One Was Lost

by Natalie D Richards

[nitzan_schwarz]

I don't have too much to say about this novel if I were honest. It's not mind-blowing, it's not bad. My favorite part of it is probably the writing, and I feel like I will probably read more novels by Richards because I enjoyed it. But there are a lot of things I didn't quite liked about it.

1. Sera's reasoning. The entirety of Sera's inner monologue about Lucas pissed me off. It was all so unbelievably stupid. I could maybe understand not wanting to have romantic relationships is she had said that they all fail in the end and bring hurt because of what her mother did, but it was all about her being like her mother and ending up hurting someone and--excuse me, are you married? are you cheating on someone? What in this situation is similar to your mother? There are no vows for you to break or children to leave behind. It just honestly pissed me off.

2. The actual mystery. I'll be honest, I knew who did it. Not because Richards set it up well (I personally thought she didn't), but because it was pretty obvious it was not going to be who they thought it is, and the fact only one person was emphasised to have been killed clinched it for me, as well as Richards aversion to actually showing us that kill. This whole novel would've been so much scarier if we actually saw someone dead, but all the time it was things they thought they'd seen, and that was suspicious as hell.

Not to mention that the whole plan is way too convoluted to make any form or sense, relies on too many variables (it relies on them doing exactly as she had planned) and I'm still not sure how she ended up pulling it off.

I was also really unsatisfied with how little we found out at the end. There is no real explanation, only a case closed with "she was crazy and was trying to re-create her sister's death". Except that doesn't make much sense, does it? The newspaper articles weren't really explained, why she thought this would allow her sister to truly rest, what she had against the guy Lucas was supposed to represent... NOTHING!

It was frustrating!

3. We find out very little about our characters. Normally, a horror story like this would be the backdrop to the characters bonding, becoming friends and learning new things about each other. Except we don't. We learn of their character, and we learn all sort of things Sera thinks she figures about them, but very little of the actual truth. Their life situations. Things they like and dislike...

I felt like something was missing. Like, I kept waiting for that moment when I'd know them, but it never came.

Anyways, a decent story, but it lacked what I was looking for.