Synopsis from the dust jacket: “The small town of Cryer’s Cross is rocked by tragedy when an unassuming freshman disappears without a trace.  Kendall Fletcher wasn’t that friendly with the missing girl, but the angst wreaks havoc on her OCD-addled brain.  When a second student goes missing—someone close to Kendall’s heart—the community is in an uproar.  Caught in a downward spiral of fear and anxiety, Kendall’s not sure she can hold it together.  When she starts hearing the voices of the missing calling out to her and pleading for help, she fears she’s losing her grip on reality.  But when she finds messages scratched in a deck at school—messages that could only be from the missing student who used to sit there—Kendall decides that crazy or not, she’d never forgive herself if she didn’t act on her suspicions.  Something’s not right in Cryer’s Cross—and Kendall’s about to find out just how far the townspeople will go to keep their secrets buried.” 

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I regret to say that I didn’t really enjoy this novel.  Most of the reasons, I believe, are based on personal preference and not necessarily on McMann’s writing capabilities.  For instance, I don’t like change.  Change is difficult for me; and the writing style of this novel is extremely unique and different.  Hence, I struggled with it.  This novel is told using the third person narrative, but it is completely in present tense.  Hence, it reads more as a play-by-play of events: “Kendall looks at the grass… the whole team stares at the ground, nobody daring to look up.”  This is actually the first novel I’ve ever come across that uses this style, and it was so different from what I was used to that I became extremely distracted by it.  Again, like I said, change is difficult for me, but that doesn’t mean you won’t like it (unless you’re just like me).  The writing style reminded me of the way a play is written, and I believe many people will enjoy this fresh style of writing; it’s just not for me.

Another reason I did not enjoy the novel is because I believe the dust jacket is misleading, therefore ruining my expectations for the novel.  Upon reading the synopsis, I was really interested—a whole town is burying a secret, and children are disappearing!  This sounds like a horror flick!  However, upon finishing the novel, I found that the townspeople aren’t trying to keep a secret buried at all—they don’t know the reason for the disappearances either.  Only two men are aware that the evil exists, but they never believed it could transcend into the real world, so I wouldn’t call that keeping a secret either.  Finding that out was somewhat of a letdown for me.

The novel focuses on Kendall’s OCD a lot, which is interesting because I have never been around someone with OCD, so I had no idea what life could be like for those people.  However, I feel like too much time was spent on Kendall and her life, as opposed to figuring out what happened to the missing teenagers.  A lot of the novel deals with soccer, and the rest tends to deal with OCD—only a small portion really deals with the mystery aspect.  I think that is why the ending confused me.  It was very quick and, to me, anticlimactic, which is a shame because I had high hopes for this mystery novel.  I’m giving this novel one star in terms of my personal preferences and likes/dislikes, but you may find that you really enjoy this novel, so don’t necessarily write it off unless you’re just like me.