All Those Broken Angels
by Peter Adam Salomon
Flux/Llewellyn, 2014
227pp, $9.99 US
ISBN: 978-0-7387-4079-9
A Review by Gene Stewart
At age six, Richard hid his eyes and counted to a hundred while his friend, Melanie, scampered off behind him to hide.
She was never seen again.
Except… when he is 16, a new girl shows up at school, claiming to be Melanie.
Richard isn’t sure because, since she vanished, Melanie’s shadow has haunted him continually, a ghost able to enter his mind, flow on walls, floors, and in corners, and this shadow ghost is the jealous type.
Worse, he knows where bones are buried. The shadow leads him there, to Melanie’s grave. Or is it?
Desperate to find out what’s really going on, Richard and the living Melanie begin investigating and find themselves woven deeply into the fabric of at least a decade of serial murder. Worse, this killer is still active, and now is after them.
This elegantly-written, concise YA thriller is eerie, well-informed about its people and places, and compels the reader toward a crescendo ending. Although the protagonists are 16 and face typical teenagers’ challenges, this book works as a thriller to please any adult, too. It evokes a place and the people vividly, never strays too far into the surreal, yet offers a lingering sense of a bigger, deeper world than we know, one that surrounds us with what many would call the supernatural. Maybe it’s just us.
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