Dangerous Girls by Abigail Haas

One moment. One picture. One glimpse - that's all it takes to make someone think they know the truth.

I practically inhaled this book, it was so good – I'm not going to lie, I may have almost fallen asleep in class today because I was up half of last night trying to finish it. This book is my definition of unputdownable, and I suffered this morning because of it. It was 100% worth it.

Anna and her best friend Elise go on holiday with a group of friends to Aruba. It’s pretty much a typical high school student holiday: lots of parties, drinking and general fun, until Elise is found stabbed in their apartment. The primary suspect? Anna.

I originally picked this up because it reminded me a little bit of Pretty Little Liars, which I seriously LOVE, but it ended up being darker and a lot more serious (obviously, because it's about a murder investigation). I recently read The Girl On The Train and the layout of the book actually reminds me a lot of that, with the different trial scenes interspersed with flashbacks from the holiday, before and after Elise’s murder, and Anna looking back on the events from where she is now. Honestly, I usually find this sort of thing really confusing and difficult to follow, but this book was brilliant in that it was always clear which point of the story I was reading, nothing felt disjointed, and it was ordered really well so that I felt like it all flowed and tied in together. On top of that, you get this really amazing juxtaposition (ooh, fancy word there) of the events from Anna’s point of view as they happened, and what’s being said about them at the trial, and it’s just so freaking clever.

I don’t often read crime/mystery/thriller type books, but this one did that amazingly perfect thing where I had just enough information to feel like I could figure out the answer, but the ending was never given away. The suspense was there, all the way through the book, and each chapter was left on a little mini cliff-hanger, so that it was pretty much impossible to stop reading because you wanted to know what happened SO badly.

Massive thumbs up to Abigail Haas for managing to make Anna simultaneously distraught (as she would be) and also incredibly relatable. I seem to find that sad characters who are always sad start to annoy me, but Anna had just enough else about her - she still had a personality outside of everything that was going on, and that made me care enough to want her to be okay in the end. I really love how this book made me think about the potential downfalls in the justice system, and how nearly anything can be manipulated to make an innocent person appear guilty, or vice versa.

The ending was pretty much the best thing that has ever happened to me. I may have actually just sat and stared at it for a good five minutes when I read it, just to help me process. Oh my God. I will forever be in love with endings which manage to surprise me, because I usually figure everything out. This was perfect, because anything else would have been really anti-climactic after the rest of the book.

I actually bought this book for one of my friend’s birthday presents because I needed someone to talk about it with so badly. I definitely, definitely recommend it to you all. Just go read it. PLEASE.