Review Detail

Tessa and Vik Gomez have encouraged their mother to move from Philadelphia to Fall River, Massachusetts after the death of their father. Tessa feels guilty for various reasons, and instead of going out to parties during her junior year, she opts to stay home. Her brother, a senior, is dating Mariella Morse, the daughter of local real estate magnates and the owners of the Lizzie Borden house in town. Mariella was raised alongside Phil, whose parents run the museum and hotel attached to the questionable tourist attraction. Phil is interested in Tessa, who keeps putting him off because of her vow to remain responsible. What the people in town don't know is the dark side of Mariella's family life; her father abuses her mother physically, and Mariella hates him so much that she plans his murder. She is descended from the Borden clan, and manages to harness the local questionable powers by creating a "tea" from herbs, roots, and moss found in the Freetown Woods, which is often referred to as the Cursed Forest. Drinking this tea has caused voices in her head that encourage her to kill her father. She has a plan; her father is allergic to penicillin, and she managed to get a vial of it from an elderly neighbor for whom she does errands. She plans to rope Vik into administering the shot. We see her plotting, but go back and forth from this time to the present. Vik has been found standing over the bodies of both of her parents, who have been violently killed with an axe. Vik is arrested, and his family from Philadelphia comes to help out. Vik's biological father is also in jail, so suspicion is high and Tessa has to deal with a lot of hatred. She knows her brother is not the violent type, and many things seem odd about his presence. With the help of Phil, and her cousin Oscar, she sets out to investigate the eerie history of the town and the Bordens, and its relationship to the murder. What really happened?