Review Detail

Dead Below Deck Featured

Young Adult Fiction 250

A modern day Agatha Christie type thriller

August 07, 2024

Overall rating

5.0

Plot

5.0

Characters

5.0

Writing Style

5.0

Illustrations/Photos (if applicable)

N/A

Everyone has secrets, and privileged girls from wealthy families seem to have more than most. When Giselle, the daughter of a senator and stepdaughter of a celebrity influencer, decides to take the family yacht from Key West to the Grand Cayman islands with her best friends from school, several of these secrets come to light with tragic results. Along for the trip is Maggie, whose sudden appearance at the girls' prep school leads to questions about her background, Viv, who is an Instagram influencer in her own right, and Emi, who is Giselle's long time best friend. The story starts on the last day of the trip, when Maggie wakes up in a hungover fog. No one has seen Giselle; she's not joined Emi and Viv for their sunrise yoga. When she isn't in her room and the crew hasn't seen her, the girls check the boat's surveillance camera... and see that she's fallen overboard. Or, more accurately, Maggie has pushed her. The police are called, and Maggie, who has no memory of the event, tries to marshall her resources to try to piece together what has happened. Through police interviews, Giselle's diary entries, and flashbacks, we get a better picture of what has occurred both on the trip and before it. Maggie was really kicked out of a Swiss boarding school, and her father isn't a spy; he's been overseas, but as a soldier, and has returned home with PTSD that has endangered the family's survival. Not only that, but she uncovered a scandal at her school and managed to turn that into scholarship money for the prep school. Giselle, whose therapist suggested she keep a journal, misses her deceased mother and has a complicated and thorny relationship with her father and stepmother. Even Viv and Emi aren't all they seem to be. As we see the trip unfolding backwards in a drunken haze of expensive champagne and ill-advised partying, we learn about secrets that could tear apart both the prep school and the girls' carefully constructed personal lives. Will Maggie be able to figure out what happened to Giselle before the police do, and will her part in the senator's daughter's disappearance ever make sense?

Good Points

This had so many twists and turns that I don't want to ruin key points in the story. Let's just say that I was very surprised at the end, and I am rarely surprised! I've read a couple of other books that embrace this backwards mystery format, like Fields' 2008 Holdup or Cadnum's 2010 Flash, but it's clearly not an overdone way to present the mystery!

I was familiar with Gangsei's fantastic middle grade titles like Project Me 2.0 and The Wild Bunch (of which I have TWO copies in my middle school library!), but had forgotten about her 2016 young adult Zero Day. She does an equally good job at both levels of interest, and has quite the eye for depicting well-to-do teens.

While the friend's secrets that are revealed aren't too devastating, they are hard for the girls to deal with. It's the interplay that goes on while people aren't sure what others know, and the tension involved with trying to keep these secrets to oneself, that keep this book taut and engaging.

It shouldn't be surprising that suspense thrillers and murder mysteries appeal to teens, since there are so many published for adults. Dead Below Deck will appeal to readers who liked titles like Barnes' The Lovely and the Lost, Corrigan's I Will Follow, Otis' At the Speed of Lies, or Johnson's new Death at Morning House.