Murder Between Friends
by Liz Lawson

My rating: 3 / 5
Genre: YA mystery thriller

Grace, Henry, and Ally have been friends for a long time, growing up near each other. Then Henry’s brother Jake was arrested for the murder of a teach at their school, and Claire’s testimony helped clinch the conviction. Two years later, Jake’s conviction has been vacated due to impropriety during the trial. Ally wants to help her best friend’s brother by starting her own investigation, and even though Claire is beginning to question what she saw the night of the murder, Ally wants nothing to do with her traitorous ex-friend. 

I wanted to like this book, as much as anything because I wanted to be able to recommend it to my teenage daughter who loves YA mysteries and thrillers. But in the end, the characters kind of killed it for me. The plot was okay—nothing more or less than you’d really expect for this genre, but decent enough. The story is told in alternating POVs between the three once-friends, 1st person and present-tense in each. (Note on that: an author needs to be really good at writing different voices to pull off multiple 1st person POVs well, and this author probably should have made a different choice. The characters mostly all sounded the same.) Ally got on my nerves with her constant and never-ending, or even lessening, hatred and anger toward Claire. Claire starting to doubt what she thought she saw the night of the murder was an interesting angle that wasn’t used well. Her POV was kind of bogged down by “domestic” minutiae. And Henry mostly just seemed sort of wishy-washy. I didn’t connect with any of the characters, which made the book feel a bit like a slog.

In the end, I don’t think there’s anything wrong with the book, exactly (well, other than a larger-than-normal number of typos for a traditionally published book, but those might have been fixed before it was published), but I was probably the wrong audience for it. Even my daughter, who often enjoys books that I don’t, is planning to pass on reading this after I told her about my issues with the characters. Still,  if you’re a fan of young adult mysteries and thrillers, you might consider checking out other reviews at the link below to see what others who liked it more than I did thought.

Thank you to Netgalley and Delacorte Press for providing me a copy of this book to review.

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