Lloyd, Stephen

Narrator Chris Ciulla delivers characters with skill and success, including the deadpan detective, the crabby librarian, and the steroid-obsessed football player. Highly recommended.

While it would be easy to underestimate this novel as a Riverdale or Stranger Things knockoff, especially since Lloyd is an award-winning TV writer and producer (Modern Family; How I Met Your Mother), the story is definitely more adult, as if Jack Reacher were called to the creepy school in Sarah Read’s The Bone Weaver’s Orchard.

Unfortunately, the main characters are two-dimensional, and fail to evolve over the course of the novel. Jones devotes his energy to pumping up the action at the expense of a logical or imaginative plot. Best for readers who want some mindless violence and a generic bad guy.