Review
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Title: Dead Girls Don’t Lie
Author: Jennifer Shaw Wolf
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Genre: YA mystery/thriller
Year of Publication: 2013 (2014, pb)
Number of Pages: 342
Binding: paper (also available in hardcover and e-book)
ISBN13: 978-0-8027-3753-3
Price: $9.99 (hardcover)
Reviewed by Julie J. Nichols for the Association for Mormon Letters
Jennifer Shaw Wolf should have an enthusiastic fan club, if she doesn’t already. Both her first novel, *Breaking Beautiful,* and this one, published less than a year later, are excellent YA genre novels, dark and complicated but with strong female protagonists who finish even stronger than they start. These are well worth buying for your young-women daughters, nieces, granddaughters, friends.
*Dead Girls Don’t Lie* isn’t ostensibly about Mormon girls, though the protagonist, Jaycee, is a member of a congregation whose chapel has a crucifix, and her grandfather was a preacher, from whom her father learned to pray a lot like Mormons pray. Part of the conflict is that Jaycee’s once-BFF, Rachel, the dead girl of the story, began to dress and act very differently—that is, in ways that make Jaycee uncomfortable, immodest and garish–just before she was shot in her home shortly after she and Jaycee discovered disturbing gang graffiti in an abandoned house where violence has taken place. Now Jaycee needs to make frightening decisions about what she can tell police and whether she’ll be safe.
Part of the excellence of this novel for AML readers is that it was written by a Mormon for a wide general audience. Many timely issues raise their grim heads here: gang violence; first and rival boyfriends; race relations; cell phone use; divorced parents, and their relationships with their children; trust in authorities, and trust in friendship. Wolf does a fine job of weaving all these into Jaycee’s story so that even we readers don’t know for sure who (or what) to trust. Rachel has left messages—on Jaycee’s cell phone but also in other places—and Jaycee gets mixed information about how to interpret them. Friends turn out to be enemies, “enemies” turn out to be friends, parents seem to betray children and vice versa. The novel is action-packed and suspenseful, the characters interesting and varied.
Though Jaycee isn’t Mormon, she’s a girl with a conscience and caring parents who has to come to terms with some very hard things—which she does in a most satisfactory way, after a pretty terrifying climax. Any daughter or niece or granddaughter (well, and maybe some sons and nephews too) will breathe a sigh of gratified relief at the ending, and their adult relatives can rest assured that justice (and mercy, too) has been served. Nothing will ever be the same, but it’s clear where right resides.
I recommend this book for a good genre read. And if Jennifer Shaw Wolf has a fan club, I recommend joining it so you’re first in line for the next novel from this accomplished LDS writer, who knows her market and writes very well outside the “Mormon” box.