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A review by oashackelford
The Box in the Woods by Maureen Johnson
5.0
After having solved the Ellingham murders Stevie is left feeling like maybe it was a fluke that she solved anything at all. She is working at a grocery store and contemplating her future when she gets an email from a man who has just bought a camp that used to be camp wonder falls, and is the infamous site of the Box in the Woods murders. Stevie jumps at the chance to solve the murders and hopefully prove that her ability to solve mysteries wasn't a fluke after all.
I really liked this book in that I thought that it had better pacing than the first three books that came before it, and I loved that the mystery was actually wrapped up in one book this time, but I don't know if I felt like it wrapped well.
No spoilers here, I will be very vague.
In the first three books in this series I thought that the author did a really good job at providing the reader with all the clues necessary to potentially solve the mystery themselves, which is something that I love. This book was a little more predictable and I felt like the ending was robbed a little bit because Stevie gets a clue that literally spells out what happened at the time of the murder instead of being more vague and possibly having a few meanings, and also that clue and it's contents are kept from the reader until Stevie is explaining who the murderer is. So it goes from feeling like you are starting to put the clues together, to being done with the clues really fast. I didn't love that. I love trying to put the clues together myself and then still being wrong when the twist comes, but ultimately the twist still makes sense. The explanation for why the murders were committed also seemed a little thin. It almost feels like the author had a deadline to finish the book so she wrote the ending really fast without worrying about it making too much sense. For the record I think it could easily be fixed by adding a little more foreshadowing in the flashback sequences. Anyways, I did still enjoy the book and would still recommend it to anyone who likes mysteries.
I really liked this book in that I thought that it had better pacing than the first three books that came before it, and I loved that the mystery was actually wrapped up in one book this time, but I don't know if I felt like it wrapped well.
No spoilers here, I will be very vague.
In the first three books in this series I thought that the author did a really good job at providing the reader with all the clues necessary to potentially solve the mystery themselves, which is something that I love. This book was a little more predictable and I felt like the ending was robbed a little bit because Stevie gets a clue that literally spells out what happened at the time of the murder instead of being more vague and possibly having a few meanings, and also that clue and it's contents are kept from the reader until Stevie is explaining who the murderer is. So it goes from feeling like you are starting to put the clues together, to being done with the clues really fast. I didn't love that. I love trying to put the clues together myself and then still being wrong when the twist comes, but ultimately the twist still makes sense. The explanation for why the murders were committed also seemed a little thin. It almost feels like the author had a deadline to finish the book so she wrote the ending really fast without worrying about it making too much sense. For the record I think it could easily be fixed by adding a little more foreshadowing in the flashback sequences. Anyways, I did still enjoy the book and would still recommend it to anyone who likes mysteries.