Danielle Valentine’s “How to Survive Your Murder” offers a disappointingly flat execution of an interesting concept.
Horror-obsessed teenager Alice Lawerence is coping with the murder of her older sister, Claire, a year after the incident. On the morning of the trial for the killer, she passes out in the courtroom bathroom and wakes up on last year’s Halloween night, with her sister beside her. Claire is alive again, and if Alice can solve her murder by midnight, she’ll stay that way.
Though this opening seems to be leading to an action-packed, high-stakes, horror-filled romp, the actual novel falls flat with predictable, illogical twists that seem to exist to surprise readers rather than to make sense. I would give this book two and a half out of a possible five stars.