Pretty Girls Dancing

Title: Pretty Girls Dancing

Author: Kylie Brant

Genre: Mystery/Psychological Thriller

Published: 2018

Obtained: Amazon

Seven years ago, a young teen, Kelsey, was abducted from her hometown leaving her family nearly destroyed in the aftermath. Affected by her disappearance are her parents, both distant and battling their own struggles, and her younger sister Janie, an intelligent but anxious teen. Now, another girl has gone missing and Kelsey’s family members are all grappling in their own way to deal with the news. Mark Foster, a detective assigned to the new case of the missing girl, begins to link similarities in the cases of the two missing teens. Foster must find an effective way to approach Kelsey’s family and discover any family secrets that may help him find Whitney before it is too late.

Pretty Girls Dancing is a page-turner! I finished this book almost as fast as I can down a good glass of rosé. Told from the varying points of view of multiple characters, the mystery unfolds at a fairly decent pace. I didn’t have an inkling that the killer was a known character until the chapter before the big reveal—and there was another twist after that!

What I enjoyed about the book was that the first chapter had me hooked. I love a good opening chapter with some kind of action that pulls me right into the story; this did not fail to disappoint. I thoroughly enjoyed the idea of the story being told from the viewpoints of different characters. Unfortunately, I really only enjoyed two of these characters: Whitney and Janie. Several of the characters felt undeveloped, which inevitably led to me being uninvested in them. Whitney and Janie, however, were rich in layers of personality and their chapters really pushed the story forward whereas Janie’s parents’ chapters felt stagnant.

The plot of Pretty Girls Dancing was intriguing. Serial Killer stories are ones that I find engrossing—they often offer the right amount of mystery and thriller that keeps me turning the pages. After a while, I began to wonder if the killer in this book was just some mystery person we weren’t supposed to know at all, given that there were no real clues to decipher the identity of the villian. However, right before the big reveal, I did have that, “Aha!” moment—but I will confess it was built on a pure guess, not context clues from the novel. I still have some confusion and questions regarding the wild goose chase the detectives embark upon in the final chapters of the book; there were no solutions or answers to what the suspected villains had to hide. This aspect of the story left me unsettled and unfulfilled.

I was surprised to discover that much of the narrative reveals less of the mystery and more of the grief and devastation that can come from a family member (particularly a child) being abducted. While I did not always enjoy reading from the viewpoints of certain characters, these pages did make me think about all the emotions and aftermath of something so traumatic happening to a family. Furthermore, for as gripping as the opening chapter was, I was surprised by how long it took for the story to really pick up at a suspenseful pace.

I recommend this book for a quick, fun read. I finished it in two days and had to keep plundering on until I could identify the bad guy and discover what kind of endings the author would write for Whitney and Janie. If you’re looking for a complex, perfectly-constructed thriller/mystery–then this is not it. Don’t get me wrong, it’s a good book (and an enjoyable read), but it had so much more potential than what Brant delivers. I recommend a strong, dry rosé to pair with it; I prefer to save my more expensive wines for more complex and riveting books. Therefore, I suggest something like Dark Horse Rosé; this wine is sweet and crisp to pair with the innocence of the girls who have been affected by the serial killer, but also dry and strong (12.5% alcohol content) to get you through both the thrilling and not-so-thrilling parts of this book.