Rating: 2.5 out of 5
Genre: Mystery / Thriller, Young Adult
People who should read this: People who like a slower paced thriller with a twist at the end.
After reading Kit Frick’s last book, All Eyes on Us, which was a great diverse read, I expected a lot more from I Killed Zoe Spanos. A lot more than the average thriller I ended up with.
If you don’t know, I’m a hard sell when it comes to thrillers. I either guess them way too early or I’m not that surprised by the ending. I guess other people just don’t have a twisted mind like I do. But, I’m sure that you’re very tired of hearing the same old story from me when you’ve been reading my reviews for the last two years.
Here’s the thing… you have a girl that happens to look very similarly to a girl that went missing 6 months before. Then you have that girl get weird, almost psychic, recollections of said girl that went missing and these two girls aren’t supposed to have a connection whatsoever. It doesn’t help Anna’s case when something did happen to her on New Year’s Eve and no one is willing to tell her what it is. All they’ll say is that she wasn’t in the Hamptons on New Year’s Eve.
So where do you go from here? First off, the memory thing was weird for me. I couldn’t get into it. Instead, I spent the majority of the book trying to figure out where Frick was going with that plot line. Are we going to find out that Anna is really a psychic and now spends her days like the Medium? I was actually a little surprised with the turn of events on that front - shocking, right - but not enough to say that the book was any good. Maybe that’s the sole reason I gave it that extra half a star. I Killed Zoe Spanos is most definitely not a book that I will say I liked.
Again, it’s the thriller thing, because when you find out who the killer is, you won’t be entirely shocked. Just remember the statistics. I ended up shrugging my shoulders and thanking the book gods that I was done. It didn’t help that I was forced to read the book on my phone because my library didn’t have a Kindle option for some reason.
I Killed Zoe Spanos really felt like a lot of back and forth between Anna and Zoe’s boyfriend. A lot of grasping at straws to find a connection. There was no meat to the story. The podcast, though a nice touch that I’m starting to see in a lot of books these days (Sadie did an amazing job with it), having to read the transcripts wasn’t what I wanted to do. In essence, they were boring and really a poor way to insert exposition. There was nothing there that gave me the chills or even a care as to why I wanted to figure out who killed Zoe. The reader needs one of those things.
It was also hard to find a reason to like Anna as the main POV. This was a girl that seems to have gone down a dark path, yet still managed to find a positive ending. She was trying to play it as the tough girl but was lacking the bite I needed.
All in all, I’m not recommending this book to anyone. I can recommend thrillers that won’t feel like a waste of time. Because that’s all this was, a waste of time when my TBR stack is a mountain that I think might just kill me.
My PSA to all writers out there, when you write a thriller, really go there. Don’t keep it easy or simple or the next door neighbor kind of murder. Make the character work for that kill.
Happy Reading
Love Kait
Reading Challenge: 109/175