Thank you to NetGalley and Random House Children's Books for the eARC!

TRIGGER WARNINGS: Rape, death, shooting, underage drinking and drug use, sexual assault, homophobia, and sexual harassment.

The second book of Emil's that I've read and a good YA/new adult mystery that leaves you think you really don't know everyone like you think you do.

Pryce is a recent high school graduate who finds out that a string of gruesome murders that happened in his small town in Louisiana didn't happen the way everyone was told it had happened. In his own pursuit to prove that the alleged killer Duece is innocent, he pulls the curtain on the town's history of coverups with the police, what the boys who were murdered had to do with their grizzly deaths, the people involved in/with the boys, and who was the actual killer.

At first I thought the book was a little slow towards the middle but I feel like it was a lottttt of character development and a lot of figuring out what was going on with the group of boys and the things they were involved in. The ending wasn't super surprising to me as I realized that if it wasn't Deuce, it had to be someone who could get in his house without being seen, someone he was close to, and Emill does leave little clues here and there were the reader should pick up on what's going on before the characters in the book do. The ending with the pastor and the other guy I definitely didn't see coming which definitely added to the corrupt mess of the town. The fact that a student journalist was able to put the pieces together but cops and a sheriff who was in on everything and wanted to protect themselves didn't want to get to the bottom of everything was NUTS. I tiny bit unbelievable, but definitely not impossible or unheard of.

There were some parts of the book that had a little bit of cringey or millennial/Gen X writing Gen Z vibes. Also the part where Pryce first met Keke and he was like, "She smelled like a flower bed with a faint aroma of burnt plastic, confirming his assumption that wasn’t all her hair." I personally thought it was a weird part of the story and wasn't really necessary because like.....wdym you assumed Keke's hair wasn't real when you don't even know that girl lol but I digress.

If you're a fan of whodunnit YA mysteries written by a queer black author with queer characters, this is for you!