Review:
Sydney, Gwen, Cami, Tucker, Beau, and Kat are six teens who live in a beachfront mansion they've named the Lit Lair - it's a collab house intended to allow the TikTokers to work together and use their follower counts to boost each other to greater heights. Sydney's parents made the down payment on the house (which she never lets them forget), but they all have an agreement that essentially makes them equal, as long as they abide by the rules of the house and continue to pay rent on their rooms.
Of course, teens being teens, there's a lot of drama under the surface. Sydney and Tucker are a couple, but Tucker's been sleeping with someone else behind Sydney's back. Cami has a secret crush on Gwen, Gwen is painfully aware that the others don't consider her to be very smart, and Beau and Kat (who many of the Lit Lair's fans ship, although they aren't a couple) are the only two in the group whose TikToks have a comedy rather than dance focus.
After Sydney gets in a fight with her housemates, she leaves and doesn't even come back for a planned celebrity meeting. But she's done similar things before, so the others shrug it off...until the next morning, when Cami spots Sydney's body in the pool while filming a live tour of the house. A short while later, someone uses the Lit Lair social media accounts to tauntingly post about her death. True, the housemates had some beefs with each other, but did one of them really hate Sydney enough to kill her?
This was one of my Book Bonanza purchases - the cover art got my attention, and I'm often drawn to YA thrillers/mysteries.
The characters in this reminded me of the movie Bodies Bodies Bodies - for the most part, shallow, rich, and annoying. The best of the bunch were Kat (whose parents made her put most of the money she earned into a college fund for herself) and Beau (a computer science student), which made me wonder for a while whether they'd be revealed as the group's secret snakes. The others were more openly awful. Cami was abrasive, Tucker was scum, and Gwen was shallow and so stupid at times that it seemed like she had to be faking it. Sydney's POV didn't come until later, but honestly most of their POVs were hard to take for long. They called each other friends but often seemed to hate each other more than they liked each other.
There were times I wanted to DNF the book just because I disliked the characters so much. At the same time, they were a train wreck I couldn't stop watching. But man, I wanted to shake some of them. (And yell at them. Yes, Tucker, you're a douchebag.)
It only took a couple clues to figure out who the murderer was, although I didn't find out the full motive until fairly late in the book. I did find myself second-guessing myself when a few secrets were revealed, though, and in general the mystery aspects were fun.
But ugh, the ending. The more I think about it, the more it bugs me. It seems to have been set up simultaneously to allow for a sequel and to make it look like some (but not all) of the characters maybe learned something from this experience. I was most disappointed in one particular character - the final chapter made it seem like they'd fall into the exact same traps as before. Plus, I still had questions (what terrible thing did you do besides the obvious? why were you in Sydney's room? does your mom still have access to your accounts?).
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