The Meadowbrook Murders by Jessica Goodman
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
Amy and Sarah are best friends, just entering their Senior year at the prestigious Meadowbrook Academy, a private boarding school set in a tiny Connecticut town.
It’s the week prior to the official school start, but the Seniors have all returned to campus. It’s expected to be a great year filled with parties, laughs and their last bit of teenage freedom before becoming adults.
All hopes of that are shattered however, when Sarah and her boyfriend, Ryan, are brutally murdered in Sarah and Amy’s dorm suite. Shockingly, Amy slept through it. She didn’t hear a thing, but she does discover the bodies the next day.
She tells the police she was the only other person in their suite that night, even though that’s not quite true. Everyone on campus and in the surrounding community is shocked, and they look at Amy now with suspicion.
Liz is also a Senior at Meadowbrook. She’s a scholarship kid, who writes for the school newspaper. Honestly, her entire life revolves around the paper. She’s dead-set on becoming a successful journalist someday and her time at Meadowbrook is the first step on that path.
Meadowbrook can open doors for her. She doesn’t come from a wealthy or powerful family, like the majority of the other kids, and she hasn’t always fit in.
Liz breaks the story of the murder. It’s too juicy to pass up and this could help her land the scholarship she needs for college. She’s determined to crack this case.
Liz and Amy have never been friends, but they’re thrust together when the school assigns Amy to be Liz’s new roommate. Clearly, Amy can’t return to her regular suite, it’s a crime scene and tainted by the trauma.
Nonetheless, Amy is none to happy to be forced to room with the random girl digging around into her best friend’s murder; exposing it to the world.
After a bit, with Amy still high on everyone’s suspect list, she decides she needs to figure this out as well, and Liz may be her best chance to get to the bottom of it.
Two worlds merge as the girls eventually thaw a bit of the ice wall between them and start to share information. Some truly fun and engaging amateur sleuthing follows.
I flew through The Meadowbrook Murders in one straight shot. I had quite an enjoyable little Saturday reading this.
As YA Thrillers go, Jessica Goodman is one of my favorite authors, and you can definitely tell this is one of her books. If you’ve read from Goodman before, you know what to expect going into this, and you won’t be disappointed.
We all know I love a private school setting and murder mysteries set a private school are my cake. I enjoyed Liz’s character arc most of all. She was one determined cookie.
I also appreciate how well Goodman frames these ‘haves v. haves not’, or ‘locals v. outsiders’ situations. This is a theme I have noticed in some of her other works, and as a person who lives in a resort community, I can relate to a lot of those dynamics and it feels very genuine to me.
Although I enjoyed Liz’s perspective a little more, Amy’s perspective added so much drama and backstory as far as the mystery into Sarah’s death went. I did grow to like Amy more as the story went on and I’m glad that Goodman wrote this using the dual perspective.
I found the who a little obvious, but the why and how, I was way far off from. Overall, I thought this was highly-entertaining and I would recommend it to any YA Mystery-Thriller fans out there.
Particularly if you’ve enjoyed Goodman’s work in the past, or if you enjoy books from Kara Thomas or Alexa Donne. Also, a must for fans of private school stories.
Thank you to the publisher, G.P. Putnam’s Sons Books for Young Readers, for providing me with a copy to read and review. The Meadowbrook Murders will be available this coming Tuesday, February 4, 2025!!
