Beautiful Malice: Review

Title: Beautiful Malice
Author: Rebecca James
Release Date: July 2010
Published By: Bantam
Pages: 272
Goodreads Rating: 3.77 stars

Review: Katherine moved to a new city with a new identity, hoping to escape her past, only to find that the "friend" she just made, the unpredictable and magnetic Alice, will do anything to torture her with it. Alice, despite her gregarious and out-going nature, is twisted and enjoys playing cruel mind games on the people closest to her. But as Katherine struggles to escape her hold, she realizes that Alice has a past of her own, dangerous secrets, and instead of escaping, Katherine finds herself falling in an ever-deeper trap.

BEAUTIFUL MALICE is the kind of book I have been searching forever for: a young adult psychological suspense. I love thrillers, but have had some bad experiences reading adult thrillers that had content way more explicit than I wanted, so you can imagine my excitement when I realized that this book was in that very genre I enjoyed so much. I had quite the high expectations for it, and to an extent, they were fulfilled, since I found this book to be gripping from beginning to end.

Unfortunately, there were some things that bothered me about this book. For one, Alice wasn't as frightening as I had expected from the book summary. She seemed more like just a very cruel person who did bad things, but they were all somewhat ordinary. Nothing struck me as especially insane or crazy or frightening. Although I was engrossed in the story, it just never got my heart pumping.

I don't want to make it sound like I didn't enjoy this book, because I did, and it's a great find for anyone who's also looking for young adult suspense novels. However, don't go into BEAUTIFUL MALICE expecting it to scare you, because it does disappoint in that regard. Still, my attention was snatched from the very first page and maintained straight through to the end, something you could easily read all at once.

3 stars