Liars Beach

 By: Katie Cotugno

Location: FIC COT

Genre: Mystery, Young Adult, Thriller

A fresh new take on Agatha Christie’s classic murder mystery The Mysterious Affair at Styles , with iconic detective Hercule Poirot recast as a brilliant, brash teen girl named Holiday, and narrated by her childhood friend Linden, an athlete-scholar who fits right in at his elite New England prep school—all the while hiding some secrets of his own.

Michael Linden—or just Linden to his preppy boarding school pals—doesn’t belong in wealthy, storied Martha’s Vineyard. But when his roommate Jasper invites him to spend the end of summer at his massive beachfront home, August House, Linden tries his best to fit in. Linden wouldn’t call it lying, exactly. Though it turns out August House is full of liars.

Then someone is found unconscious in Jasper’s pool, and everyone has something to hide—Jasper, his beautiful sister Eliza, their older brother Wells, and their friends. The accident is written off as just that—an accident—but Linden begins to wonder...

Holiday Proctor. Linden’s childhood friend, and the one person on the island who knows the truth about Linden. There’s nothing Holiday loves more than a good old-fashioned mystery and she’s convinced there's a potential killer on the Vineyard. The only question is…who?

A fresh take on one of my favorite Agatha Christie novels (The Mysterious Affair at Styles), Liar’s Beach was aptly named. After all, with secrets, lies, and plenty of hidden agendas buried deep within its pages, there were plenty of unexpected details left to uncover.

While billed as a YA mystery, I personally found this one decidedly more along the lines of a crime fiction novel geared towards teens. Following in Christie’s brilliant footsteps, the plot unwound with one twist after another, although perhaps a bit more predictably than the Grand Dame of Mystery herself. I was, however, thoroughly pleased to find the much required dénouement at the very end where all of the suspects gathered for the final reveal. Even better, I didn’t, for the life of me, sniff out what really happened until Holiday delivered her spiel.