Little Monsters by Kara Thomas
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
**4.5-stars rounded up**
Kacey has had a strained relationship with her volatile mother for years. When it becomes too much for her to handle, Kacey moves to Broken Falls, Wisconsin, to live with the father she has never met.
Her Dad has a wife, Ashley, a step-son, Andrew, and a younger daughter, Lauren. Kacey is simply thrust into their family. It’s not necessarily comfortable at first, but overall she’s grateful to have a more secure environment. It’s definitely a change for her.
It’s not necessarily easy to be the new girl at school either, although we love a new girl trope.
Luckily for Kacey, Bailey and her best friend, Jade, see Kacey, a ship without a port and take her into their group. Soon enough the trio are like peas in a pod.
They get up to the typical high school girl things like sneaking out, trespassing and trying to summon spirits in abandoned buildings. You know, the usual. There is some minor tension amongst the girls, of course, but that’s normal too.
Sometimes Kacey prefers to spend quiet nights at home, but Bailey and Jade are usually fairly insistent that she join them on nights out.
On the night of the biggest party of the year though, Kacey doesn’t hear from them. They seem to have ghosted her.
Kacey is concerned. Even though she enjoys some quiet time, FOMO is real. The next day, Kacey receives the news that Bailey is missing. She just disappeared, gone in the night. Did she run off, was she taken, is she still alive?
When the police question Kacey, she’s not exactly forthcoming with the truth. Does she have something to hide she’s not letting on to the Reader?
This was such an interesting story. We followed Kacey mostly, but we also got some of Bailey’s perspective. It was a compelling sway of back-and-forth.
Kacey was an interesting main character, who had been through a lot already in her young life. Now as she seemed to be settling into a more secure home environment, other aspects of her life seemed to be getting out of hand.
The more Kacey digs, the more it seems that everyone suspects her of having done something to Bailey. Kacey’s determined to figure this out. She actually wants to find Bailey, but small towns can hold a lot of secrets and loyalties run deep.
Kara Thomas knows how to build suspense. This one had me absolutely glued to the pages. It was unsettling. Stories like this, that feel so very real to life can be so disturbing.
I picked this up as Book #11 for my TBR-Haul Project. I hauled this in November of 2018 and am so happy that I finally made the time for it.
I’d heard a lot about this book from others and everything they said was true. I definitely recommend the audiobook format. It was fantastically narrated. I was so invested in this narrative and characters.
This is such a compelling mystery. Highly recommend!