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There is a part of me that thinks I am suffering a little from series overkill with this fifth book in the series, as it really didn’t grab me in the same way as the others.

This instalment begins with Ali’s presumed killer locked up, and A is assumed dead. Naturally, just when you think things are going to calm down, the whole story goes off in a direction you weren’t expecting. We are treated to Spencer acting in increasingly irrational ways; Emily decides she fancies a boy; Hanna gets together with a nice boy but is so determined to remain popular that she acts in truly appalling fashion and Aria gets a little close for comfort to her mum’s new boyfriend.

Although we have already met Kate, Hanna’s step-sister to be, she really steps up here and is more than a little irritating. The show certainly benefits from clever editing, but even in the books I am struck by just how dumb the adult characters are shown to be. How can all this stuff be going on around them and nobody notice?

While I am able to gloss over the increasingly frustrating clothing references (perhaps it’s my age) I was really not enjoying this. However, it picked up towards the end and does just enough to get our curiosity about Wilden aroused. While I will continue reading the series, it won’t be for some time…back to Netflix where we haven’t got some of the best characters bumped off!

 

Seventeen year old Cassie has a natural talent – she can read people, and is adept at working out their likes and interests from observation. This is a skill that she’s always had, and refined with her mother’s help. Unfortunately, since her mother’s disappearance – and presumed death – Cassie hasn’t felt comfortable with her talent.

Then one day the FBI come calling and try to enlist Cassie in their new program, using teenagers with exceptional abilities to profile cases that haven’t been solved. Determined to try and find out more about what happened to her mother, Cassie enlists – and gets a lot more than she bargained for!

While the whole idea might be seen as preposterous, this is a highly entertaining novel that will be of interest. There are some graphic details connected to murders, but nothing like the level of detail that some writers seem intent on giving us.

I enjoyed seeing how Cassie got on with the other teenagers she is placed with. They are all damaged in some way, but the relationships that Cassie forges were interesting.

At one or two moments the story felt slow, but when we are introduced to the serial killer currently at work – who seems to be linked to Cassie in some way – it becomes a lot more intriguing. Throughout I was trying to second-guess just who was involved, and how, but I was totally off!

In the second in the Pretty Little Liars series we continue with the creepy messages from A and it’s quite unnerving how the messages show explicit knowledge of what the girls have been up to. It’s enough to make anyone paranoid, and you can sense the creep-factor being ramped up here.

Naturally there are some differences from the TV series, in terms of order of events and the level of focus on specific characters. Honestly, I do think the girls in the books are a lot less appealing; they’re all heavily flawed, and we don’t really see much sign of any redeeming features.

After the discovery of Alison’s body at the end of book one, it’s of obvious interest to work out what’s going on. The fingers are pointing heavily to Toby and all the girls have moments that are worthy of some horror movie parody. The notes from A are genuinely creepy though, and I felt that with the adult characters acting as they do it’s hardly any wonder that the girls are rather flawed.

We are told a little more about the situation between Jenna and Toby, though it’s painted in a far less positive light here. While I’m finding the reading of this series good fun, I can’t deny it is totally superficial.

My first encounter with Emily, Spencer, Aria, Hanna, the mysterious A and a whole host of other characters came when I started watching the series on Netflix. It’s the kind of series where everyone is impossibly glamorous – I’m pretty certain that few people look like this lot at high school – but the wicked humour and clever plotting has quickly made it a firm favourite of mine. Although I’ve become an avid fan of the series, I wasn’t sure if I could face reading the sixteen novels on which the show is based.

I can only apologise, and say that I wish I hadn’t waited so long.

For those of you unfamiliar with the series we focus on what was a close-knit group of friends. They have gone their separate ways since the ‘leader’ of their group – Alison – has gone missing. Her disappearance causes ripples in the small community of Rosewood but life goes on.

Just like the TV series we are aware very early on that the key characters are all involved in something that the group want to remain hidden. Their secret has kept them tied to each other, even though they don’t seem to like each other very much at times.  We become aware that each of the girls also has their own secret, which Alison knew, but none of the others were aware of. These secrets are things they don’t want anyone to know about, yet when they start receiving messages from ‘A’ we watch them unravel as they try to work out just who is watching them.

The idea of someone monitoring their every move in the way that would have to be happening here is quite creepy. Initially the girls think Alison can’t have disappeared and that she is tormenting them for her own fun. However, when her body is found in her old back-yard, it seems there’s a little more to this mystery than we first thought.

While I found the constant name-checking of brands and products rather irritating in the novel, I was interested to see how the novels differed from the show. The female characters in the book are more nuanced than we’re led to believe and I liked the fact that their roles within the group are not quite so defined. In my head as I’m reading I confess to visualising the characters from the show, even though in a number of cases they are nothing alike. The first novel ends shortly after the discovery of Alison’s body so we are left with many questions, and I really liked the device of having A directly address us at the end.

I picked this up because of a reading challenge I’m involved in which is focusing on Series reads – with sixteen to get through, I might not manage them all in one go but I’m happy to read along for a little.