By: Alex Finlay
Many thanks to Minotaur, St. Martin’s Press for the eARC of this book!
Every year the May Day killer takes a girl in a small midwestern town – either he kills her or lets her go. Jules Delaney is one of those girls, she’s a “lucky” one. She wasn’t left for dead. Quinn Riley’s life isn’t going as planned when he gets arrested. After getting out, he joins the military. Jules and Quinn know each other, they went to school together. Quinn’s mother is killed while he’s locked up, not by the May Day killer, but they aren’t really sure who. Told in simultaneous timelines, Jules is hunting the May Day killer while Quinn is trying to figure out the secrets she kept, and who killed her.
This is a very interesting read. The plot line was new and refreshing. While it is of a slow burn mystery turns thriller towards the end, it really worked for this book. For a while, I was wondering what the crossing point was going to be for the story lines, but it gets there, and it’s GOOD. The slow burn aspects of it never made me want to put the book down either, I kept wanting to read it.
Each section of the book is told on May 1 of that year and it spans across a decade. I appreciate that because it makes it feel like finding who is behind didn’t happen to quickly, and is more in line with how real investigations take time. Then we get chapters about Jules and about Quinn. This makes for an easy read. There isn’t too many points of view, and there isn’t any back and forth between timelines for each chapter.
You sort of feel bad for both of them and root them on so that they could get closure. While Jules is the pretty model type, Quinn seems to just be existing in life until Jules and him meet again.
The ending of the book gets real twisty. There was the first reveal and I thought that was going to be it. But NOOOO, Mr. Finlay tricked me and threw another twist in there that was even better than the first!
So if a well written thriller with some really fantastic twists are your thing, make sure to check this one out!
Publish Date: May 12, 2026
Find the book here.
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