MOST LIKELY TO MURDER https://ift.tt/R2SZbdG

Social outsiders Rick Hicks and his best friend, Martina Lopez, just need to get through senior year—and hopefully along the way they won’t get into any fistfights with classmates or be expelled. Maybe they’ll even find girlfriends and avoid being murdered. That final task soon becomes their primary assignment in this steadily suspenseful and occasionally gory thriller. Soon after school starts, the previous year’s yearbooks arrive, and everyone discovers a shocking prank: Someone replaced the yearbook superlatives with descriptions relating to death (“Zara Moxley, Most Likely to Choke on Her Own Words”). Rick and Martina appear as “Homecoming’s Cutest Corpses.” When the body of grouchy guidance counselor Mr. Stephens (“Most Likely to Sleep with the Fishes”) is pulled out of a local lake, the other potential victims team up to find out who’s behind the gruesome stunt. Before they can solve the case, a few of the amateur sleuths meet their predicted creepy, bloody, or strange ends. McBride slowly unravels the suspects and their motives, building up to a cinematically dramatic conclusion. White-presenting Rick’s non-murder-related concerns—his family’s financial struggles, his growing romantic feelings for classmate Nika Page, and his ride-or-die friendship with Martina (who’s cued Latine)—form the story’s emotional core, through which readers experience Meadowvale High’s horrific happenings.

from Kirkus Reviews https://ift.tt/v29WMOl