Ten | Gretchen McNeil | Reviewed by Erin

Ten | Gretchen McNeil | Reviewed by Erin

• Monday, 29 September 2014

In Gretchen McNeil’s murder mystery novel we are introduced to a group of ten teens. We first we meet best friends Meg and Minnie as they arrive on the island where popular girl Jessica is holding her extremely exclusive weekend-long party that the girls were invited to. Although not all of the teens know each other before arriving for the party they are all connected in some way.

With their host held up and unable to make it to the house until the next morning the group take to making themselves at home and getting to know one another. Looking for something to pass the time they decide to raid the DVD shelf but find only empty cases. About to give up they then stumble across an unknown DVD and decide to watch it. What they find is unexpected, a homemade video full of creepy words and images and soon after strange things start to happen to the teens as they come to realise that one of them must be a murderer. Despite all of the twists and turns I did unfortunately correctly guess which of the group was the killer, however I didn’t quite manage to guess all of the details so there were still a few surprises in store along the way.

Having not long before read, and very much enjoyed, James Dawson’s somewhat similarly premised novel Cruel Summer I was intrigued to see how US based novel Ten would compare. If you only pick up one murder mystery novel this Halloween I’d go with Cruel Summer, however if you’re a fan of the genre why not pick Ten up too!

4/5 Halloween Pumpkins!

This post was written by regular reviewer Erin, get to know her here