Title: Kill Me Again
Author: Leslie Rule
Genre: Supernatural, Ghosts, Paranormal Mystery, Young Adult
Publisher: Andrew McMeel Publishing
Publication Date: April 3th, 2012
Goodreads | Amazon | B&N
Review copy provided by the publisher through Netgalley.
In her dreams, her life was not her own. Awake, the threat of danger was real. Everyone said that she was crazy. But when Alexis dreamed of dying, she knew she had been killed before. And if it had happened once, it could happen again.
This must be one of the shortest synopses ever, but yet it still intrigued me enough to request a review copy of this book through Netgalley. Let me start by saying that Kill Me Again did not dissapoint in the slightest. When I first started this book, I wasn’t sure what to expect. I thought this was going to be a ghost story, or at least a story about a girl who dreams about a past life. While that’s partly true, this novel is so much more as well. Alexis travels back to the town where her Mom grew up. But as soon as she arrives in town, it looks eerily familiar, as if she’d been there before.
According to her Mom, that’s normal because she went there once when she was a toddler. Eerily enough, while she was there, Alexis stumbled upon the body of a teenage girl, who drowned in a pond in the park. But as Alexis spends more and more time in her hometown, she begins to suspect the teenage girl drowning wasn’t a drowning at all. And as for her aunt Nan, Alexis isn’t entirely convinced Nan left home all those years ago.
Then another girl ends up missing, and eventually Alexis is the one to find her body in the same body she found that other drowned girl over a decade ago. As she begins to remember things she couldn’t possibly remember, Alexis grows convinced of two things. She’s the reincarnation of Nan, and she didn’t run away from home – she was murdered. And she wasn’t the only one…A serial killer is loose in the town of Oxford, and Alexis is the only one who can figure out who it is. Before it’s too late and she becomes his next target.
The author does a great job of describing the town of Oxford to the readers. I especially liked the “drowned” city, a part of the city flooded by water which now rests in an underground lake.
I really enjoyed Kill Me Again. All of the topics, from the romance subplot to a serial killer on the loose to reincarnation intrigued me. I was a bit dissapointed that ghosts didn’t play an actual part in this book, but I got over that quickly. Leslie Rule definitely surprises with sublime characterization skills, excellent prose and the ability to hold one’s interest until the very end, revealing the clues slowly enough to keep tension building. If you’re a fan of thrillers, ghost stories and paranormal mysteries, this is definitely a nice read. I hope Leslie Rule’s other book, Whispers From The Grave, is just as good.
[…] Kill Me Again by Leslie Rule […]