Reviews with content warning for Death - Wonderland

In a book where everyone’s a suspect it’s hard to know who to trust. In this case, that also includes the author. She strung me along with her cohesive writing style and great dialogue and tricked me into believing she had a grand plan for this story. She did not.

This whodunit kept me hooked ALMOST until the very end. Author Jennifer Hillier threw practically every curveball she had in her arsenal into the final five chapters, and it came out exceptionally underwhelming. However, for the first 85% Jennifer had me thoroughly inthralled with her very well written and engaging mystery. By the last 50 or so pages, I was more so anticipating the book to be over than to find out who was behind all of Seaside’s Wonder Workers disappearances.

I was left with a couple of questions by the end. Some of which that were technically answered in a “this was necessary for the purposes of helping the characters solve the crime” and not in a sensical, realistic, kind of way. The others weren’t even set up for you to be able to form your own conclusions; they were just left open. Definitely would have benefited from having a couple additional chapters to properly wrap things up if not a time jump epilogue.

Some characters were given back/side stories that offered absolutely nothing to the plot or to the character’s development. Oscar and his restaurant. Vanessa having an affair and murdering her husband. A security guard who killed his mother. Hovey and his gambling and porn addictions, to name a few.

The relationships evolved entirely too quickly and ended just the same. Most of those scenes felt like rough drafts. The instantaneous development between Vanessa and Tanner whose feelings for one another evolved “off screen”, and after only one interaction, was crazy. Not to mention the love octagon that involved everyone being infatuated with the “Dragon Lady” Bianca, for seemingly no reason whatsoever. Fourteen year old Ava and eighteen year old Xander? Vanessa and oozing red flags Oscar?

There is also a scene where a security guard attempts to rape a fourteen year old Ava, which was only a means to get said girl into the underground tunnel so that she can discover the hostages. This, amongst many other things toward the end of the book, inevitably led me to change my initial four star rating into a two.

I would recommend this book to someone who is into murder-mystery and not so much horror/thriller. There were no jump scares or gore. The dialogue between most of the characters felt natural despite all the pop culture references. You genuinely won’t know who the villain is until the end, because you can’t trust anyone throughout the book. Lastly, this book is good as a buddy read to be able to share your predictions and bounce your theories off of someone else.

Content Warnings

covublitz's review

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dark mysterious slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? No
Loveable characters? No
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

2.0

ICK. I like the general idea of this book (

serial killer in a theme park

), but omg.
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The trigger warning list for this book is a mile long (it would have been shorter to select what’s NOT in it), and it is WILDLY problematic. Characters are horribly unlikeable and should certainly all be in prison. The casual homophobia and transphobia are disgusting, as is the graphic and frequent pedophilia . Main character runs around with a victim mentality when she’s one of the worst of the bunch. Honestly, if they had all died I would have cheered.
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Two stars only because I couldn’t figure out the killer right away (

thought it was going to be the original park owner/child molester and faked his death in the fire so he could continue to kidnap teenage boys and lock them in the sex dungeon he built under the park — nope. Turned out to be an incel revenge plot because the new sexual predator/CEO had rejected this dude when he got too old to be her type, so he kidnapped all the people that aged out of her abuse, put them in the OG sex dungeon because they weren’t good enough for her anyway, and murdered them when he ran out of space and needed to go grab someone else.

).
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Picked it up for a horror/thriller bookclub. Hate-read my way through it, then took a really long, hot shower to get the ick off my skin. This book sticks with you, and not in a good way. Do not recommend.

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