beauty is a weapon

Anhalt, Texas is getting ready for the 50th Annual Miss Lone Star Pageant, a beaty pageant for the local high school girls. Sarah Lynn has been training for this all her life. Her mother Kennedy had won 25 years before, and she had been preparing Sarah Lynn since she was a toddler. Sarah Lynn is so certain the title is hers that she signs up her two best friends to compete also. What could it hurt?

But Kennedy knows that every pretty girl is the pageant is competition, and she certainly hopes that Sarah Lynn is the winner, but there are no guarantees. All Kennedy can do is control what she can, and dig up all the information she can about the others in the pageant.

But the pageant wasn’t the only thing that happened 25 years ago. At that same pageant, Ingrid waited impatiently for her twin sister to show up backstage. Isabelle wasn’t competing, but she was supposed to help Ingrid with her talent routine. And she disappeared. It has been 25 years, and Izzy never showed up. Ingrid believed that her boyfriend at the time, Ben Sherman, killed Izzy and buried her on his family’s ranch.

Ingrid had left town after high school, but she’s back now for a while. Her mother, the first ever Miss Lone Star, has cancer, and Ingrid came home to help. But being back in Anhalt, seeing Ben Sherman, seeing the tributes that people still leave at Sherman Ranch is hard on her. The family sold the land, and it’s being used to build new homes, but it’s also where the pageant will be held, in the Activity Center. With the anniversary of the pageant, and of her sister’s death, there are new news reports and podcasts, but no one has yet solved the case.

The lives of these mothers and daughters are as intertwined as ever, and as the days before the pageant tick away, there is more discontent bubbling under the surface. Something else is bubbling overhead, with threats of storms and ice predicted for the night of the pageant. As danger closes in on them from every angle, secrets come out, along with a gun. So the question becomes who will win the night, and who will lose everything?

Pretty Dead Things is the story of a small Texan town, its secrets, its lies, its history laid bare. It is a slow burn thriller that quietly reveals who the monsters are and who are the victims. The Miss Lone Star Pageant has historically brought out the best and worst of those involved, and as its secrets come out, everything gets upturned. There are so many layers to this story, I had a little trouble keeping up. But it was all entertaining.

I listened to Pretty Dead Things on audio, narrated by Andrew Eiden, Brittany Pressley, Mia Wurgaft, Saskia Maarleveld, and Stevi Incremona. Having five different narrators telling the story made it more interesting, each narrator taking on the voice of a different character and adding depth to this complicated story. Because there were so many characters, having five different narrators helped keep them straight, but the large cast also made it more difficult to keep all the characters straight. It’s doable, but it did take me more concentration than I’ve needed for other books.

I really enjoyed Pretty Dead Things. The background of the beauty pageant added a lot of intrigue to the female relationships, and the slow unraveling of all the secrets kept me guessing until the end. This is a complicated ride, but I loved it.

Egalleys for Pretty Dead Things were provided by St. Martin’s Press, and an early copy of the audio was provided by Macmillan Audio, both through NetGalley, with many thanks, but the opinions are mine.