Young Adult Review: Confessions of a Murder Suspect by James Patterson and Maxine Paetro

Confessions of a Murder Suspect by James Patterson and Maxine Paetra

Paperback, 372 pages

Published: September 24th, 2013 (in paperback, hardcover was Sept. 2012) by Little, Brown

Source: Publisher/ Big Honcho Media

James Patterson returns to the genre that made him famous with a thrilling teen detective series about the mysterious and magnificently wealthy Angel family . . . and the dark secrets they're keeping from one another.

On the night Malcolm and Maud Angel are murdered, Tandy Angel knows just three things: 1) She was the last person to see her parents alive. 2) The police have no suspects besides Tandy and her three siblings. 3) She can't trust anyone—maybe not even herself. Having grown up under Malcolm and Maud's intense perfectionist demands, no child comes away undamaged. Tandy decides that she will have to clear the family name, but digging deeper into her powerful parents' affairs is a dangerous-and revealing-game. Who knows what the Angels are truly capable of?

This was my first James Patterson book and wow, I was blown away! I have been in the mood for more mysteries lately, which is weird as I use to not really read mysteries at all.  But unraveling things as the story goes on, piecing clues together and being surprised over and over again is turns out to be a lot of fun!  And I really enjoy the young adult mysteries even more for some reason.

In this book we get a different style as Tandy is talking directly to us, the reader.  She addresses us as the reader and everything.  If I hadn't just read it and experienced it, I would say that that is weird and that I probably wouldn't like it.  But that wasn't the case at all, I loved it!  It not only made it a different experience, but it allowed even more mystery.  Tandy is one we could say is an unreliable narrator.  She even addresses that in the beginning of the book.  As we read on we see that's not exactly right, but there are things from her past that are a mystery to us, and even a mystery to her, she's unraveling these things that she partly knows, but partly doesn't.  That may sound confusing, but it isn't.  As a matter of fact, this book was very easy reading.  It was easy to understand, but not easy to piece the clues together.  There was twist after twist after twist and I honestly had no clue which direction the book would take.  When things finally came together and we found out the truth my jaw dropped.  I was NOT expecting that.  And I loved being surprised!

Tandy was a great character to read, I really loved her voice and how she addressed us.  But in this book we see her grow and change quite a lot.  There's a big reason for that, which is one of the twists in the book so I won't be telling you.  Tandy's family is eccentric, to say the least.  They've been raised to be geniuses in one way or another.  They have not had a conventional child hood in any way, shape or form.  I felt bad that they never got to be normal kids and I saw that pretty much everyone had a reason to kill the parents.  On the other hand we see the good in the parents that were killed as well, and this made some good reading because my emotions were all over the place.

While it would be too lengthy to talk about each secondary character individually I will say that they each stood out in some way.  They had strong personalities that made them each memorable.  We see the good and the bad in each of the children.  While they are a little crazy in their own ways and while we don't know what to think of them, we can't help but love each of them a little. Or in some cases, a lot.  It's very easy to spoil things for this book, so I'll leave it at that.

I was surprised with how much I loved this book.  I've gone back and forth on my rating.  I'm giving it 4 stars, but it's good enough that I would say even 4.5 wouldn't be too generous.  Now I'm off to read the next book, Confessions: The Private School Murders.  I look forward to reading more about this crazy and eccentric family and to see what happens next as there are still plenty of unanswered questions.

Disclosure: I received this book for review purposes, all opinions expressed are my own and I was not paid or influenced in any way.