Teenager
Jess Tennant and her mother have moved from London to Port Sentinel on the
English coast to get away from Jess’s father, a divorce, and the shambles of an
old life. There barely three months, Jess has found herself in the middle of a
second mystery (the first, How to
Fall, involved the suspicious death of a cousin). A teenage boy from
her school has been beaten badly and left for dead or near-dead.
The
boy’s sister asks Jess to find out what happened, and to do that, she has to
run smack into the face of the local police chief, a series of high school
in-crowds, her old boyfriend and the boy who wants to be the new boyfriend. And
her father shows up in all his obnoxious presence.
What
Jess finds, in Jane Casey’s young adult novel Bet
Your Life, is secrets, dark secrets, and danger.
Bet Your Life was originally
published in Britain, and it’s surprising in several ways. First, the scenes
and the dialogue, with a few exceptions, sound almost American. Second, the
teenagers in the novel act more adult than most of the adults do (adult males,
in particular, don’t fare well here). Third, this may be a mystery, but there
are more romantic stories going on at any given time that you find in a lot of
romance novels.
And,
yes, the book kept me interested and intrigued the entire time. It’s a
fast-paced read, and it’s easy to suspend belief and follow the story as it
develops and morphs downs highways and byways.
 |
| Jane Casey |
I
understand what part of the appeal is, and why a lot of adults are buying young
adult fiction. These novels don’t have graphic, gratuitous sex that is required
in most popular novels today. Bet Your
Life takes a dark turn but contains nothing graphic or gratuitous.
Casey
is an Irish crime writer, and this is the second Jess Tennant mystery. She’s
previously published five mystery novels in the Maeve Kerrigan series: The
Burning, The
Reckoning, The
Last Girl, The
Stranger You Know, and The
Kill. A third Jess Tennant mystery, Hide
and Seek, is scheduled to published in late August.
Bet Your Life is an easy,
entertaining read right to the end.
Photograph: Guy Fawkes Day bonfire by
Angie Perkins via Public
Domain Pictures. Used with permission. Such a bonfire plays a role in Bet Your Life.
Unfortunately, Glynn, you can't count on no gratuitous sex scenes in YA novels anymore. Intact, they've become almost as sexually explicit as adult novels have. Some reviewers I know will classify a book as "middle grade", even if it's about teens, if it doesn't have any treatment of sexual themes or any "adult" language. I'm glad you got one of the cleaner ones.
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