Rating: WARTY!
This is part of a series with the rather lame inevitability of the word 'dead' in every title. Apparently no one told Marlene Perez that Charlaine Harris has already been there and done that. I didn't realize that this was part of a series when I picked it up on close-out. I went by the blurb, which I freely admit is often a mistake, which made no mention that this was volume three. I don't hold the author responsible for this since you give up all control of what's on the cover when you go with Big Publishing™ The story is set in Nightshade, a town busting at the seams with paranormal characters and activity, yet the blurb mentions none of that. It merely says that the fraudulently described "smart sisters" are psychic.
Note that the fraud was not in describing them as sisters. The blurb and the title do, I grant, indicate some paranormal goings-on, but nowhere near to the extent that this book exhibited. Again, if I'd known beforehand that there were vampires, and that one of the sisters was dating a werewolf, I would certainly have left this particular novel to gather dust on the clearance shelf! I certainly have no intention of pursuing this series. The weird thing was that neither the werewolf boyfriend nor the vampire was the reason I disliked it! This amused me even more than the title had.
My initial problem was that the author seemed to think that the only virtue female characters can have is their beauty, which is a major turn-off for me in any novel. However, this one surprised me by eventually leaving that theme where it belongs - in the past - which was unexpected, I do confess! Unfortunately, and just when I thought I could stand to read no more, the main character (another first person PoV I'm sorry to have to report) decided to focus on the mystery rather than the looks of all the females in town. Unfortunately, other issues kicked in at that point too, so the story still fell short of being a worthy read for me.
Apart from an obsession with looks, one thing which turns me off is dumb female characters. Yes, there are dumb people in life, male and female (and even some in between), and once in a while you can get an entertaining story out of such a character, even more so if she wises up, but you can't get a good story out of a young woman who is, even within the framework of the story, persistently and irremediably too dumb too live, or one who fails to fulfill even the author's own criteria for the character.
Clearly not much thought went into this series. Nightshade is supposed to be a relatively small town (at least it is from reading the test), yet it has a large high school with a successful football team, it has a college, and it has assorted other large town things going on, things found only in larger towns, yet it's talked about as though it's a cozy little village. It made no sense.
This novel was told from Daisy's PoV. Daisy has two sisters who are named Poppy and Rose, which was a bit too trite for my taste, and Daisy was not only not the sharpest knife in the knife drawer, she didn't seem capable of hosting much that was in the way of intelligent thought, or of following even elementary logic. She was presented as this psychic investigator who was supposed to step into the gap left by her mother's absence. She failed dismally. She mentioned her psychic powers frequently, but barely used them even when it would have made clear sense for her to do so. We were told more than once that she was "rusty" in practicing using her powers. Who, in real life, if they found that they had such power, would get rusty in using it? No one! Of course, this doesn't happen in real life, but in the book it was part of real life. It made no sense that she would become rusty or would have little or no interest in using her powers.
The sisters' mom was in Italy, where she and her daughters had spent part of the summer. Dad is out of the picture having gone missing in an earlier volume evidently. The girls were purportedly back to attend school, although none of the story took place in the school to speak of. All three of them get jobs without a shred of effort although, after the initial 'just starting her tiring job as a waitress period' is over, Daisy is never doing her job either.
Apparently unencumbered by school or work, Daisy has all the time in the world to wander around trying to figure out what's going on and she still takes forever - long after the reader has it all sorted. Some people describe a character like that as a Mary Sue although technically that's incorrect. A Mary Sue is a character who goes through a novel without a thing going wrong, without running into any difficulties, and without making any mistakes, but gets everything done, and does it perfectly. A Mary Poppins would be actually a better name for such a character. This would leave the term 'Mary Sue' open for the use it seems to be adopting: that of a character like Daisy who can't figure out anything, despite clues that are obvious even to a reader like me who is typically the last to figure things out. Maybe we should call such a character an Ian! So Daisy spends the entire novel, virtually, being a complete Ian.
The problem in this story is that someone is making clones. There are two obvious suspects, yet never once does Daisy suspect either one. Neither of them is investigated even though one of Daisy's sisters works with one of them, and Daisy herself witnesses the other doing things which are quite obviously shady and underhand, and which involve secret spells and employing old clothes. These are the smart sisters, remember, yet the one with whom one of the sisters works is called Doctor Franken (I am not making this up) who works in a genetics lab, yet never once does anyone consider that she might be a suspect!
Worse than this, the plan is supposed to be these clones taking over of the town council. They could have done this with bribes or blackmail, or better yet, used direct magic to control these people, yet instead they come up with the idea of creating clones to replace the council members! The problem is that not one of the initial clones is a clone of a council member - they're just random citizens which are then allowed to wander around town aimlessly. Worse than this, the clones have a sugar craze and eat large quantities of sweet food such as donuts, and still no one suspects a thing.
Now this is a town in which supernatural activities go on all the time, yet no one, not even the "smart" sisters, thinks for a split second that well-known citizens are suddenly behaving oddly. These sisters are not smart. They're morons. They don't even react when the yard is invaded by a ravenous pack of werewolves - other than to run indoors. They never call the police even though the wolves could be harming someone else while these chickens cower indoors. They never make the connection between the ravening wolves and the football team jocks suddenly miraculously bulking up on muscle. They're worse than irresponsible; they're freaking idiots.
I don't need books about idiot girls in my library. If I wanted to see that I would watch so-called reality TV (in which I have absolutely no interest either). Had this novel been written for middle-graders, I might have perceived it differently, but it's aimed at young adults and it misses its mark disastrously. It is not a worthy read, not even remotely.
