Murder Land by Carlyn Greenwald

The quick cut: A girl who gets promoted at her theme park job finds her life upended when someone dies on the ride she's operating.

A real review:

Thank you to Sourcebooks Fire for providing the arc for an honest review.

Theme parks are a fun way to spend a free day, but what happens behind the scenes can make that difficult to enjoy. The moving parts, the complications, and usual management dynamics. How would you react if it ended in the death of a co-worker?

Billie is excited for her summer. She gets to spend it with her best friend, a crush going in the right direction, and her promotion at work to ride operator. Unfortunately, the upbeat feeling ends quick when her first night on the job ends with a co-worker dead. What starts as a heart attack quickly looks like something more, specifically that is being blamed on her. What really happened? Is something bigger going on?

I really wanted to enjoy this book, especially since the theme park setting seemed perfect for a thriller. Unfortunately, it goes wrong in part due to another book doing a FAR better job at this. Plus, the characters never really get fully fleshed out, making it hard to truly care about them. That's necessary to feel connected to the storyline.

Billie is excited for an amazing summer and quickly loses so much of what she cares about. It's hard not to sympathize with her. That being said, she also clearly doesn't know the people in her life as well as she thinks she does.

Truthfully, the book FantasticLand does this story better. I hate saying it because I loved the setup here, but it just doesn't come together very efficiently. More character depth and development was needed to truly pull it all into an unforgettable story.

My rating: 3 out of 5