BOOK REVIEW: What You Left Behind by Samantha Hayes

This is a book review for What You Left Behind by Samantha Hayes. I received this ARC from NetGalley in exchange for my honest review. The scheduled publication date is April 14, 2015. 

Two years after a terrifying spate of teenage suicides, the remote village of Radcote has just begun to heal. Then a young man is killed in a freak motorcycle accident and a suicide note is found among his belongings. When a second boy is found dead shortly thereafter, the nightmare of repeat suicides once again threatens the community. Desperate for a vacation, Detective Inspector Lorraine Fisher has just come to Radcote for a stay with her sister, Jo, but the atmosphere of the country house is unusually tense. Freddie, Jo's son, seems troubled and uncommunicative, and Jo is struggling to reach out to him. Meanwhile, Lorraine becomes determined to discover the truth behind these deaths. Are they suicides, or is there something more sinister at work? Finding answers might help Freddie, but they'll also lead to a shocking truth: whatever it is--or whoever it is--that's killing these young people is far more disturbing than she ever could have imagined, and unraveling the secret is just as dangerous as the secret itself. 

First of all, I can't believe I finished this book. Call it curiosity to see what the ending would be. Or call it guilt at marking an ARC as a DNF. I don't like to do that. The book starts with a man and a woman stealing a motorcycle and going for a joy ride. The author deliberately just used pronouns, no names so the individuals' identities were kept a secret. The prologue ends with the motorcycle crash. The woman is driving and wearing a helmet, while the man is not. The woman loses control of the bike and crashes into a tree. The woman is stunned and the man is dead. For reasons that are completely unknown, she decides to just walk away from the crash and pretend nothing has happened. 

After the prologue, the book kind of went downhill. The reader learns that the motorcycle bike is ruled an accident after a suicide note is found, which raises a lot of questions. First of all, the author incorporates way too many point of views. Jo's son, Freddie is depressed. We learn that he is being severely bullied by classmates. They tell him he should kill himself and give ways for him to do it. This part of the story was handled so badly. Freddie never told anyone he was being bullied and he made horrible decisions. I do understand that some kids keep that to themselves. But where I think the author went wrong is that this storyline was pretty much dropped for other mysteries . . . and there were way too many of them. When the stuff about him being bullied does come out, we get a paragraph about how he should have told sooner and they were going to a meeting with the school. That was it. Nothing about the kids doing the bullying and actually, those kids are never given faces. I also have a big problem with how everyone treated his depression. Jo and her sister, Lorraine, talked about it constantly. But they talked to each other, never Freddie. Because of the suicides in the town the previous year, they didn't want to "encourage him." I had such an issue with this. You would think they would want to prevent any more suicides, but their attitude is to ignore it. Even Lorraine, the police detective, didn't think there was anything wrong with this.

As I mentioned, there were way too many mysteries. There was the mystery of who Jo was having an affair with, the suicides that weren't really suicides, the mystery of who was on the bike with Dean, the mysterious photographs that Freddie was trying to steal a computer for, etc, etc. Seriously, my head was spinning with all the questions and some of them were still left unanswered at the end of the story. I had issues with Lorraine and her detective work. Yes, she was right about her hunch that suicide was not really a suicide. But she had no evidence and she just expected them to reopen the case for very flimsy reasons. Also, when Freddie went missing, she showed zero concern. She told Jo to wait a night before panicking. Yes, he was almost eighteen so it's not like the police would take that seriously after a couple of hours anyway. But this was a boy who had been so severely depressed that he refused to leave his room. So when he disappears, she should have taken it more seriously. And even when Freddie had been missing for more than twenty-four hours, she still seemed more concerned about the bike crash than in Freddie's whereabouts. If that were my sister, I would have been pissed. When they finally wrapped up the mystery, I was just relieved that the book was over.  It wasn't that much of a surprise, but certain things were, along with the motives. The ending seemed thrown together and it wrapped everything up in a hurry. I honestly didn't get the motivation behind some peoples' actions. I won't give anything away, but I am still scratching my head. Oh, and it is obvious the author knows nothing about autism. There was a character, Gil, people said was autistic. But his behavior indicated more of a mental impairment. Gil appeared very disturbed and did things that people excused because of his "autism." All in all, there were just too many issues with this book. 

Buy/Borrow/Skip: Skip this one. It's just not worth it.