The audiobook was entertaining, but it was weird to hear the narrator be a character who wasn’t Joe from You, so I didn’t trust him initially and thought he killed his own best friend. Once I got used to Ethan’s character and separated the narrator’s voice from Joe’s voice, I realized he was far too sad to have done that… unless he was an unreliable narrator, in which case I was still here for that.  

I have trouble grasping why so much time had to go by for the story to start. I know real life doesn’t always wrap up with cold cases, but I just didn’t like that the characters didn’t seem to function as real adults. To have practically the whole cast of kids be in the same houses 30 years later was a strange choice when they could have aged the kids up a couple of years when Billy disappeared and had a little less time go by and it would have made sense how fresh it all was to everyone and they could’ve still been adults with lives. Or this could have taken place over a holiday with the now adults visiting their parents who still lived there and would have made sense. 

I enjoyed the mystery and figuring out how and why the Institute may have been involved, but I felt frustrated by all of the avenues that turned out to be dead ends and all of these interesting connections kind of overlapped and fizzled out. The truth was a convoluted mess of random events, which is similar to reality in some ways, but then why even have closure? I think that’s really the biggest issue with the book for me was just how unrealistic it seemed. Random events that all somehow lead to Billy’s death was less like real life mess and more like a Final Destination movie chain of events.  Characters who haven’t seem to have grown in 30 years seemed as if they were just waiting around for the story to start up again like NPCs in a video game just waiting for the player to walk by. 

Still, I enjoyed listening and finished it quickly, so I do recommend it if you’re looking for a mystery that dips into the dynamics of being a kid a bit. I don’t think it’s the authors best book and I wished the main plot points were all put together a little better.