Everyone kept telling me Holly Jackson's new one was her best yet. TikTok loved it. BookTok crowned her Author of the Year. So I went in expecting that same breathless energy from A Good Girl's Guide to Murder - and what I got was something slower, stranger, and honestly more interesting, even if it doesn't quite stick the landing.
I started this one on a Saturday afternoon, grading a stack of junior essays on The Great Gatsby that were testing my will to live. Denise was out, the apartment was quiet, and I figured a German-language mystery audiobook was exactly the kind of ridiculous distraction I needed. (Yes, I listen to German audiobooks. My grandmother was from Stuttgart. My accent is terrible. We move on.)
The True-Crime Conceit That Actually Works
Here's what Jackson does that's genuinely clever: the entire story is framed through a true-crime documentary crew filming Bel's family. Bel's mother Rachel disappeared sixteen years ago when Bel was two - the only witness to whatever happened, and she remembers nothing. The documentary is supposed to be the story. Then Rachel just... shows up. Alive. With a story that sounds like it was workshopped by someone who watched too many Dateline episodes.
This is where the book earns its keep. The question isn't really "where was Rachel?" - it's "why is everyone lying, and about what?" Bel becomes an investigator inside her own family, and Jackson layers the paranoia effectively. You're never sure who to trust, including Bel herself. The meta-layer of the documentary crew adds this constant surveillance anxiety that feels very contemporary. My students would actually dig this part - the way truth becomes performance when cameras are rolling.
Pia-Rhona Saxe handles the German narration with a good instinct for when to lean into suspense. There's a restraint to her delivery that works for this kind of slow-reveal mystery - she doesn't oversell the twists, which I appreciated. The moments where Bel is questioning Rachel's story land with the right amount of skepticism in Saxe's voice. She understands that pause is punctuation. I can't speak to dramatic character differentiation since my research didn't turn up specifics there, but the pacing of her read kept me locked in during the middle stretch when the plot itself was taking its time.
Fourteen Hours Is a Lot of Hours for This Story
And here's where I have to be honest. At nearly fifteen hours, this book overstays its welcome. Jackson's previous work - Five Survive, for instance - was lean and claustrophobic. This one meanders. There are sections in the middle where Bel is essentially going in circles, revisiting the same suspicions, having similar conversations with different family members. I found myself grading papers and realizing I'd missed ten minutes and... hadn't actually missed anything. That's not a great sign.
The pacing issue compounds at the end. After all that slow buildup, the resolution feels rushed - characters accept revelations that should shatter them with a speed that felt emotionally false. It's the literary equivalent of a teacher cramming three weeks of curriculum into the last class before winter break. I've done it. It doesn't work there either.
If you loved Holly Jackson's tighter thrillers, this is her attempt at something more ambitious - a family drama wrapped in mystery, filtered through media criticism. It's her Gone Girl move, basically. But where Gillian Flynn committed fully to the darkness, Jackson pulls back just enough that the ending feels safe when the story earned something messier. A Curse for True Love pulls a similar move - a story that keeps softening the blows right when you want it to commit to the damage.
Who Gets an A, Who Should Drop the Class
If you're a Jackson fan who wants to see her stretch beyond YA thriller conventions, this is worth your time. If you're learning German and want a mystery that won't lose you with overly complex prose, Saxe's clear delivery makes this pretty accessible. But if you need tight pacing and a payoff that matches the setup's ambition - or if you mostly listen while multitasking and can't afford to zone out during the slow middle - you might want to wait.
At 1.0x speed, those fifteen hours felt like they could've been eleven. I'll say this much: I'd bump it to 1.15x if I did it again, which is practically heresy coming from me. The prose here doesn't demand the same savoring that, say, a Donna Tartt novel does. It's functional thriller writing - good, but not the kind where every sentence earns its space.
The Red Pen Stays in the Drawer - Barely
Holly Jackson is growing as a writer. The ambition here is real - the documentary framing, the unreliable family dynamics, the way she interrogates true-crime culture while writing inside it. But ambition without discipline is a rough draft, and this one needed another pass with a ruthless editor. Saxe's narration carries the German edition well, especially in the suspenseful stretches. It's a good audiobook that's about two hours away from being a great one.
