i’m curious how my fellow mystery-readers tend to review the whodunits and twisty thrillers, etc that they read. i have a few sitting on my finished list that i haven’t written up a review for, but it’s difficult to truly say how i feel about them without praising or critiquing details of the mystery itself. i’m of the opinion that reviews should be spoiler-free, though – i want reviews to be for the people who haven’t read the book and want to know the thoughts of the people who have read it before they make a decision. and so i want to limit my review of how the story doles out information, makes a grand reveal, or ties everything together (and how that all impacted how i felt reading it) to the broad strokes… even if i also want to back up my opinions with the specifics.

one thing i love about pagebound as a platform is that i can share my more detailed, spoiler-y praises and critiques on the book’s forum and they’re as connected and as much (if not more) of the discussion as the reviews themselves. i also think you can link to posts? so i’m now kind of thinking for books like these i can do two reviews: one as like a final thoughts review with spoilers in the forum where i can lay it all out, and then a spoiler-free overview for the actual review. then i can add a link to my “review with spoilers” forum post at the bottom of my spoiler-free review in case people want to engage with the in-depth reasoning behind my opinions.

have any of you done something like this? or if not, what’s your general approach to reviewing mysteries (or i guess any genre really that would warrant getting into the nitty gritty spoiler territory of why things did or didn’t work)?