Have You Seen Me – Alexandra Weis
SOME SECRETS CAN CHANGE YOUR LIFE … FOREVER.
Lindsey Gillett is missing.
And she’s not the first girl at Waverly Prep to vanish without a trace.
To help cope with the tragedy, new history teacher Aubrey LeRoux organizes a small student investigation team. But when the members start turning up dead across campus, Aubrey suspects there’s more going on than anyone is willing to admit.
The murdered students all had something in common with Lindsey. They shared a secret. And what they uncovered could threaten the future of the historic school.
At Waverly Prep, someone wants to keep the past buried—along with anyone who gets in their way.
I received a review copy through Netgalley and the book was brought to my attention by Jamie-Lee at Black Crow PR
When you grow up reading books set in schools and featuring school kids you don’t realise schools feature less and less in your chosen reads as you move away from MG, YA and into (in my case) crime and thriller fiction. So when I started Have You Seen Me – a crime thriller set in a residential school I was transported back to a period of my life where schools were the staple location for the books I read.
Have You Seen Me is a YA thriller which is aimed at readers aged 12 to 17 and I would absoultely have been here for this book at that time of my life. It has a group of school friends who have concerns the adults responsible for their care are not listening to their worries that something has happened to a girl in their class.
At Waverly Prep missing girls seem to be something of a recurring issue. The staff at the school believe the missing girls simply ran away, they were disruptive troublemakers and they didn’t seem to want to be at this illustrious institution. Aubrey Leroux was a student at Waverly Prep and girls in her year went missing. She suspected foul play at the time but she didn’t know she had been a suspect too.
Aubrey had been a scholarship student and there would have been no way that her family could have afforded to send her to Waverly Prep were it not for her academic prowess winning her a place. Naturally this singled Aubrey out amongst her peers at the time, the fact she was dark skinned in a school with mainly white rich kids was also a situation she endured. Now Aubrey returns to her old school to take up a teaching post. Her new boss, her old headteacher, remembers she brought attitude and problems with her so Aubrey is already striving to make a good impression in her new role.
It’s not the best start for her though – as when she was a student – a girl has gone missing from Waverly Prep and Aubrey feels there have been too many instances of missing kids for it to be a coincidence. She believes there is a danger in the school and she wants to investigate. But the local police don’t support Aubrey’s suspicions so it falls to Aubrey and a group of her students to conduct their own enquries.
The missing girl is Lindsey Gillett. Her classmates hail her as a popular student but this isn’t mirrored by the staff opinion of her. Aubrey starts to look further into Lindsey’s time at the school and with her student investigators they start to ask tricky questions. The old groundskeeper remembers Aubrey from her time as a student but he warns her off looking too much into the background of the school and the large grounds it sits in, particularly the old battlefield and graveyard.
Of course the more the students and Aubrey snoop the more likely they are to draw unwanted attention and soon a missing girl is the least of their worries as one of their number meets a nasty end. There’s a murderer hanging around the school and it doesn’t look like he is going to settle for just a single victim.
As this is a YA novel the more brutal detail of the murder scenes are not shared with the reader – that’s all down to your imagination. But the manner of the deaths and the set-up to a catastrophe is still rather disconcerting at times. I liked the imagination Alexandra Weis brought to the second half of the story when the danger is ramped up to the max. But it was a bit of a slow burn initially and I found the students and their manipulation of their teacher to be irksome rather than engaging – I am putting that down to my age though!
All in I enjoyed Have You Seen Me. It was darker than I had expected but not in a graphic way. A couple of twists were a little too easy to spot but the exectuion of the story was still well handled. Stick with it through the build up for a full on last third where virtually anything goes.
Have you Seen Me is published by Vesuvian Books and is available in Hardback and digital format. You can order a copy here: https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B08Z5XJ74Y/ref=dbs_a_def_rwt_bibl_vppi_i2
