Dead of Summer by Jessa Maxwell
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
Dead of Summer is a mysterious warm weather read told through three perspectives: Faith, Orla and Henry. Their perspectives collide over the course of one Summer on Hadley Island, off the rugged coast of New England.
Faith comes to Hadley with her new boyfriend, David, feeling like this could be a big step towards them taking their relationship to the next level.
Orla is a Hadley native, who spent many Summers palling around with David when the two were younger.
Henry is the perspective who seems the most disconnected from the circles the two women circulate in. How is he going to fit into it all? That was a big question for me.
The majority of the mystery involves a girl named Alice, who was Orla’s best friend. She disappeared one Summer night a decade ago, never to be seen again.
When Orla returns to the island, to prep her childhood home for sale, the location brings back a flood of memories. She can’t stop thinking about Alice and feels compelled to dig up the truth surrounding the night she disappeared.
As luck would have it, David is there for the Summer, along with his new girlfriend, Faith, and for good or bad, Orla and David end up reconnecting.
Meanwhile, Henry is sitting back, watching it all. He’s surprised to see these faces from the past reappearing. It floods him with memories too; unpleasant ones.
When another teenage girl disappears, Orla, David and Henry find themselves pulled into another mystery, so similar to the one that has haunted them all for years.
Dead of Summer is one of those stories where I was really dialed in initially. I loved meeting the various perspectives and getting established in our setting of Hadley Island.
I live on a small island off the coast of Massachusetts, that is a desirable Summer resort location, so I found Hadley Island, and the kind of families discussed, very relatable. I think Maxwell did a great job of developing that and creating interesting back stories for each of our main characters.
I also enjoyed the initial roll out of the mystery. Unfortunately, the further it went along, as more and more of the puzzles pieces started to fall into place, the less compelling I found it.
As the truth starts coming out, it felt like a let down. The climax wasn’t as exciting as the build, because for me, the truth wasn’t as high stakes as I was anticipating.
It’s really hard to explain what I mean by this without spoiling anything, I just feel like the build was so good and the end was just sort of middle of the road.
With this being said though, I can often be a nit-picky bitch and I can see that this is overall a good story. This would be a great book to take on holiday, or to the beach.
It’s a fairly quick read, and depending on your state of mind, this could be the perfect read for you. Jessa Maxwell has a ton of talent and I know I’ll be picking up more of her work, even if this one didn’t quite knock it out of the park for me.
Thank you to the publisher, Atria Books, for providing me with a copy to read and review. I appreciate it so much!