By Meghan Mazzaferro
Content warnings: physical abuse, violence, blood, child abuse, domestic abuse, death, confinement, pregnancy, bullying
Several months after solving the murder of her former best friend, Alice Ogilvie is happy to stick to investigating older mysteries—like the death of a movie starlet in Levy Castle back in the 1920s. Unfortunately, while snooping around the castle at a school dance, Alice stumbles onto a chilling scene: one of her classmates, Rebecca Kennedy, lying in a pool of her own blood, and another, Helen Park, standing over her with a bloody knife. Castle Cove’s inept police department thinks it’s an open-and-shut case, but even though Alice saw Helen with the knife, she and Iris can’t help but think something else is afoot. Something that just might tie into the death of that movie starlet Alice finds so fascinating.
I went into this book super excited to watch Alice and Iris tackle another mystery, but unfortunately, this one didn’t grip me quite as much as The Agathas. While I enjoyed the blending of the past and present, how Alice stood out as a character, and some of the fun reveals, the pacing of this book was a little bit off and stretched my suspension of disbelief a little further than it can go for a contemporary teen mystery. It was still a fun time, but it wasn’t as compelling a read as the first book.
The highlight of The Agathas was the relationship between Alice and Iris, the friendship that developed between them, and the ways they played off of each other. While I didn’t always feel like their voices were super distinct, I loved their dynamic. In this book, both Alice and Iris are dealing with personal struggles that put a strain on their friendship. While those struggles made sense for where each character was at in their lives, the book didn’t delve deeply enough into how they were feeling and dealing with those struggles. It felt more like those plot points were just there to keep the girls apart. I trust they’ll be addressed in the next book, but it pulled me out of the story to see these things mentioned once and then completely ignored. Likewise, there were several seeds planted in the first book that only existed in the background of this book. There’s another murder that Iris is casually investigating that I assume will be the major focus of the third book, but there are also issues of character relationships, crushes, and evolving friendships that were established in the previous book and mentioned several times in this book, but go nowhere, which was a bit frustrating.
The actual mystery is fun, if a little ridiculous—Alice and Iris commit several crimes in this book that are a little hard to overlook, and when I found myself siding with the inept, sexist police officer telling the girls to stop or risk jail time, I knew that my suspension of disbelief had been pushed to the breaking point. I did find some of the foreshadowing really fun and was excited when I caught onto little hints the authors were laying for the reader but, unlike in the first book, those clues resolved the mystery too quickly and I found myself getting impatient with the girls for not figuring things out faster. I also found that, unlike the first book, I wasn’t emotionally invested in the outcome of either mystery so the stakes didn’t feel as high.
Overall, this book just fell a little short compared to the first. The stakes weren’t as high, the hijinks got a little too ridiculous, and the core dynamic of the book, the relationship between Alice and Iris, was underutilized. I still think it was a fun read and I’ll be checking out the third book when it comes out, but I wouldn’t recommend this one as much as I do the first.