Thank you to Celadon Books for the review copy of this book in return for my honest thoughts.

Locust Lane follows a small town community in the aftermath of the murder of a teenage girl. Through the many twists and suburban drama, the story overall shows how easily injustice against marginalized people and outsiders can take place. Anyone who doesn’t fit in or isn’t willing to protect the community even when it isn’t right is at risk.

While I thought the message behind the story was good, I wasn’t very drawn in by the actual mystery. It didn’t have me hooked or particularly interested but I continued reading just to find out the ending. For most of the book I seemed as though it was pretty obvious what happened and so the twist definitely surprised me. Looking back, the twist definitely makes sense although I didn’t feel there was much of a build up or enough hints as to that being the answer.

One problem I did have however was the amount of characters, while I get the importance of them, I just found there were too many to keep track of. It wasn’t until I was more than halfway through that I really started to remember who was who. I think the problem was that nothing really stood out about each individual character, and they all had fairly generic names.

Aside from that however, I think the book was good, just not really anything special. If you like crime novels I would definitely say go for it, it’s just not something I would pick up again.