All Fall Down by Ally Carter

Author: Ally Carter
Publisher: Scholastic Press
Date of publication: January 2015

Grace Blakely is absolutely certain of three things:

1. She is not crazy.
2. Her mother was murdered.
3. Someday she is going to find the killer and make him pay.

As certain as Grace is about these facts, nobody else believes her -- so there's no one she can completely trust. Not her grandfather, a powerful ambassador. Not her new friends, who all live on Embassy Row. Not Alexei, the Russian boy next door, who is keeping his eye on Grace for reasons she neither likes nor understands.

Everybody wants Grace to put on a pretty dress and a pretty smile, blocking out all her unpretty thoughts. But they can't control Grace -- no more than Grace can control what she knows or what she needs to do. Her past has come back to hunt her . . . and if she doesn't stop it, Grace isn't the only one who will get hurt. Because on Embassy Row, the countries of the world stand like dominoes, and one wrong move can make them all fall down.

In All Fall Down, Grace has returned to Embassy Row to live with her grandfather while her father is deployed.  He is an ambassador which means she will be living in the American Embassy.  For Grace, the return is bitter sweet as it holds constant reminders of her late mother.  She is convinced her mother was murdered by a scarred man and that it wasn't an accident.  When she sees him at an embassy ball, she decides to try to figure out what really happened. 

I was surprised at how much I enjoy All Fall Down.  I thought it was a really good mystery that totally kept me guessing.  In fact, I will admit to thinking that Grace really was crazy a time or two during during the story.  I totally didn't call the end.  Which was a kind of cliffhanger, by the way and one that is making me want the next book, like now!  

While I liked Grace's character, she could be a little angsty at times.  Besides Grace, there are some other great characters in the book.  Noah was adorably nerdy. Megan was kind of scary in a kick-ass secret spy kind of way. And Alexi looked to be a possible love interest in the future.  This is definitely a series that I will continue with and one I would recommend to anyone over the age of 13.