My struggles with the book, unfortunately, were many as well. I thought the author did an especially nice job of capturing 1880s Paris and of filling her murder mystery with lots of creepy twists and turns, many of which kept me guessing until the very end, and I was also very intrigued with the idea of the main character being a teenage girl who writes the daily morgue report for the local newspaper. I liked that the novel reads as part thriller, part historical fiction, and that it even has a little supernatural twist.

It sounds great, doesn’t it?Īnd there are quite a few things I did enjoy about it. It’s a YA murder mystery set in Paris during the 1880s, and it features a female protagonist, Nathalie, who is a newspaper reporter and who also happens to have supernatural visions that could come in handy when it becomes clear a killer is on the loose in her city, targeting young women. Jodie Lynn Zdrok’s debut novel Spectacle is a book I really wanted to love. As the killer continues to haunt the streets of Paris, it becomes clear that Nathalie's strange new ability may make her the only one who can discover the killer's identity-and she'll have to do it before she becomes a target herself. Nathalie's search for answers sends her down a long, twisty road involving her mentally ill aunt, a brilliant but deluded scientist, and eventually into the Parisian Catacombs. When the body of another woman is retrieved from the Seine days later, Paris begins to buzz with rumors that this victim may not be the last. That is, until the day she has a vision of the newest body, a young woman, being murdered-from the perspective of the murderer himself. Her job is to summarize each day's new arrivals, a task she finds both fascinating and routine. Sixteen-year-old Nathalie Baudin writes the daily morgue column for Le Petit Journal. All opinions are my own.Ī YA murder mystery in which a young reporter must use her supernatural visions to help track down a killer targeting the young women of Paris.

Genres: Historical Fiction, Young Adult FictionįTC Disclosure: I received a complimentary copy of this book from the publisher via Netgalley. Published by Tor Teen on February 12, 2019

Spectacle by Jodie Lynn Zdrok