Review: People Like Us by Dana Mele

Author: Dana Mele
Publisher: G.P. Putnam's Sons Books for Young Readers
Date of publication: February 2018

Kay Donovan may have skeletons in her closet, but the past is past, and she's reinvented herself entirely. Now she's a star soccer player whose group of gorgeous friends run their private school with effortless popularity and acerbic wit. But when a girl's body is found in the lake, Kay's carefully constructed life begins to topple. 

The dead girl has left Kay a computer-coded scavenger hunt, which, as it unravels, begins to implicate suspect after suspect, until Kay herself is in the crosshairs of a murder investigation. But if Kay's finally backed into a corner, she'll do what it takes to survive. Because at Bates Academy, the truth is something you make...not something that happened.


People Like Us takes place at a boarding school where seniors have a tradition of skinny dipping in the local lake After the Halloween dance, a group of friends find a dead classmate floating in the lake.  The next day, Kay gets an e-mail from the dead girl with a scavenger hunt.  If she doesn't participate, her deepest secret will be revealed to all.  I was looking forward to reading this one, but sadly it didn't live up to my expectations.  

The book just ended up being an OK read for me.  I felt like the characters were kind of cliche. None of them were very likable, including the main character.  Her "secret" didn't even end up being that bad and was easily explained.  I mean there was a little twist to it, but no one knew about that twist except Kay.  The "scavenger hunt" was very underwhelming.  I thought it would be more mysterious, but it really wasn't.  The killer was very easy to predict.  There was a little twist about the killer, but that wasn't even that exciting. 

I think YA mystery lovers will find something they like about the book.  It wasn't awful, it just wasn't as good as it could have been.