Book Review: Pretty Dead Queens by Alexa Donne

Pretty Dead Queens by Alexa Donne
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Pretty Dead Queens was the book I was in the mood for and was perfect after Elminster. This book took me from death to someone terrible, to solving a really old murder written in a famous book, and the surprise wasn’t something I was expecting. Pretty Dead Queens blew me away, and it is one of those books that make me want to reread it as if it was the first time.

Cecilia Ellis has just moved to her grandmother’s place after her mother’s death and was enjoying the days of being a senior—making new friends, going to classes, and having a typical weekend. But then one day during a game against the school’s rivals, she finds a friend dead in the pool, just like one of the characters in her grandmother’s novels. Shocked that someone would kill the girl, Cecilia starts to investigate her friend’s murder. With help from her friends and Ben, an intern that works for her grandmother, they dig up things about who might be the murderer, thinking about the murder that happened to another girl in the 70s.

While investigating the murder, there is a con going on in town about her famous grandmother (the grandmother is a writer). Her grandmother wrote books based on the town of Seaview, and of a murder about a prom queen—something Cecilia’s friend was. But the more she dug and got into it, the more she realized that her so-called friend, Natalie, was a total bitch who uses people to get what she wanted. I was and wasn’t expecting that Natalie was a bitch, but when we met her in the cafeteria, you can feel like she is.

At the funeral, Cecilia lashes out and just revealed everyone’s dirty secret, and the mayor thought that she was the one texting him. He nearly jumped her at the funeral, but her grandmother stopped him, and I think the police did as well. After giving the police officer a read about his drinking, they went home. At the prom. Cecilia apologized to everyone and even got a weird text message about going back to the poolhouse, where she saw Natalie’s dead body. The texts started to get weirder and she left, going back inside until she found her prom date, Ben, and they left to go back to his old home.

The two spent the night, and Cecilia started to look around, to be nosy…and she found the key that Natalie and Bronte has. Then her phone kept blowing up with texts from Amber, Bronte and I think Morgan about Ben, wondering if she was alright, and that they had something on Ben. Cecilia went to the bathroom, thinking that she could escape when she opened the door and Ben was there, revealing that he was the one who killed Natalie, and the two got into a tussle and slipped and fell nearly off the sliding house. But the both of them were saved, and Cecilia went home…

…when her grandmother started acting oddly strange. Things started to click in her head about the past, how it was Maura (the grandmother) who killed the prom queen Caroline, and also her husband for a book she was writing. Cecilia was trying to run away while her grandmother was trying to kill her but in the end, Cecilia defended herself and pushed her grandmother in the dumbwaiter, and now that Ben was in jail and her grandmother is dead, she got the house and everything else, and the FBI agent whom Cecilia thought was the killer is conducting her search into Maura Ellis and if the books she’d written were based off murders she committed.

This book kept me in twists and turns, and I couldn’t stop thinking about the book. It was that good, and I wish there were more because I liked the world and how Cecilia solved the case. I was not expecting that twist at the end at all, and I’m still thinking about this book to this day.

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