French does a really good job of racheting up the tension in this one. I was on the edge of my seat many, many times. It felt like Maine, and even if I had a few guesses about which town it was, nothing about the setting was so unusual that it felt like a made up place. The kids seemed pretty realistic, but maybe a little more laissez-faire than I would have thought (but then, they aren't necessarily a group I would have been hanging out with.) The girl-fighting though (cold shoulder)--that felt real. I thought the ending wrapped up very quickly, and not necessarily in a way that felt like it went with all the build-up.