What’s Murder Between Friends by Meg Gatland-Veness

Title: What’s Murder Between Friends

Author: Meg Gatland-Veness

Genre: Crime

Publisher: Pantera Press

Published: 4^th June 2024

Format: Paperback

Pages: 304

Price: $22.99

Synopsis: ‘I think it was one of us,’ Walter says … ‘We had the perfect opportunity. Everyone’s thinking it, I’m just saying it.’

The last thing Hallie and her drama classmates expect to find on a high school scavenger hunt is a dead body. In a town with a population of about thirty-six, no one has experience with murder investigations, but now everyone’s asking who killed Ms Lovelace.

The drama kids thought they were the only people nerdy enough to be at school on a Sunday. When they learn that Adam Tolentino, football star, drama-club nemesis and the hottest boy in school, was there too, Hallie is given the task of finding out what he knows – but she soon learns there’s more to Adam than meets the eye.

Although still grieving her favourite teacher, Hallie knows the show must go on. Managing a musical and a murder investigation is a lot, but Hallie and her friends won’t give up on Ms Lovelace – or each other.

‘Musicals, murder, and the perfect amount of drama. What’s Murder Between Friends is a guaranteed page-turner.’ Tobias Madden, bestselling author of Anything But Fine

‘Surprising and clever, What’s Murder Between Friends kept me guessing to the very end.’ Amy Doak, author of Eleanor Jones is Not a Murderer

~*~

Hallie Warner lives in a small town – the kind with a very small police station, a school where there aren’t many students, a single take-away place that everyone goes to, and where inevitably, everything and everyone is somehow connected. A place where secrets should be hard to keep, right?

Not so much, it would seem. As soon as the beloved drama teacher, Ms Lovelace, is found dead during a scavenger hunt at the high school on a Sunday. And at first, Penny, Dmitri, Walter, Hallie and Dorothy are the main suspects – because as the drama kids, everyone thinks they’re the only ones who could know anything. Nobody else is nerdy enough to be at school on a Sunday. Hallie and her friends go through the suspects and evidence, ignoring warnings from Walter’s father. And in this tightknit community – everyone is a suspect in this novel. Everyone could have a motive. And deeper secrets and histories are at play as events from the past leak out and implicate people or play with their emotions. Meg has created a world where suspicion flies around, where everyone has a stake in the game. As clues about Ms Lovelace’s murder come to light, and Hallie and her friends start poking around, things start to go wrong. As they inevitably do in crime fiction. Walter is the son of the local police sergeant, so he brings that angle into the friendship dynamics of the group.

Because Walter has grown up in a policing household, and Hallie’s town is so small, doesn’t have a police station. He is more suspicious of everyone – and sees motive in the tiniest things. He’s the only one brave enough to voice his suspicions that it had to have been one of the drama students. He posits that they had the perfect opportunity to commit the awful crime – and only them. Yet, as each suspect is eliminated, cast aside, and red herrings thrown around. The question of whodunnit and why they did it is constantly there. Like a good crime novel, it hits all the beats to keep the reader engaged, and wanting to find out what really happened. I found myself reading huge chunks in one sitting, trying to put the clues together and work out a motive as I careened towards the ending.

The murder is framed by the drama class, musicals, and the performance that Hallie and her friends are working towards when they find Ms Lovelace, and life seems to go on after the death of Ms Lovelace. The school community, apart from the drama class, appears to move on – though she was a favourite teacher. Adam Tolentino is a suspect – he’s hiding secrets that Walter is sure are suspect, and Adam is presented as a questionable character, whilst Walter is shown as the respectable, normal boy who would never hurt anyone.  The twists and turns complicate things, and centre the teens as the ones solving the crime with the police in the background, allowing a fantastically thrilling story that young adult readers will love.

What I loved about this book was its focus on friendship amidst the crime and drama on the page. Meg has brought several fabulous elements to tell this engaging story that had me wondering who had committed the crime, and why. It was the surprising elements sprinkled throughout that made this the exceptional novel with dry humour, wit and brilliantly placed drama and musical references amidst tragedies being brought back to the fore as death seeps into the small community again.

Meg uses the brilliant Australian backdrop to explore murder, betrayal, family violence, suicide and eating disorders, and the things in our lives and society that can trigger these things, so this book is best suited to ages fifteen and over, and will appeal to fans of Meg’s previous books.