This is Our Story (Ashley Elston)

This is Our Story
Ashley Elston
Little, Brown Books
Fiction, YA Mystery/Thriller
*** (Okay)

DESCRIPTION: Five teenage boys, united by wealth, influence, and wild streaks broad as an interstate, were at the private River Point Hunting Club after one of their notoriously raucous parties when they decided to go into the woods in the wee hours to try their luck with the local deer.
Only four returned.
Due to the power embodied in the families of the suspects, the district attorney Mr. Gaines is eager to see the death of Grant written off as an unfortunate hunting accident. There's no way to know which of the boys actually fired the rifle that killed him, as they all admitted to using it for target practice earlier, and there seems to be no solid evidence to go on when the only eyewitnesses are the only suspects, each backing up the stories of the other. Five boys, dark woods, deer... surely, it was all just a terrible mistake. Thus, the case lands on the desk of an aging public defender, Mr. Stone, in the expectation that he'll do little more than give the appearance of considering charges before giving up. But the DA underestimated the old man... and his intern, Kate Marino.
A gifted photographer and member of her school newspaper and media club, Kate dreams of going to school in New York City, and hopes that an internship in a law office - courtesy of her best friend Reagan's family contacts, and helped by her own mother working for Mr. Stone - will make the resume of a small-town girl stand out. But her time there has taught her a certain cynicism about the notion of justice... until young Grant's death and the case of the "River Point Boys" (as the foursome come to be known in local media) land on Mr. Stone's desk. She never told anyone, but she and Grant had met briefly some weeks before his death, and had been texting each other almost nightly - communication that Kate had hoped would spark into something real, until they had a falling-out the night before the tragedy. Now, she has a chance to help see justice be done. But investigating Grant's death is more dangerous than she realizes, unearthing secrets and corruption that spread far behind the bounds of teenage hijinks to spread through her whole town... secrets that have already proven deadly once...

REVIEW: At the start, this looked like a nice, thrilling, potentially twisty tale, unraveling stories and unearthing motives and stopping a killer (or killers) from getting away with cold-blooded murder, a case complicated by friendships and rivalries and class divides; Kate and her friends are firmly on the opposite side of the tracks and town influence as the River Point Boys and their well-connected families, who have their fingers on the scales of justice from the start. Kate's not-quite-illicit, not-quite-romantic (yet) relationship has an air of potential narrator unreliability, adding another wrinkle, in addition to giving the girl extra incentive to step a little beyond her minor role as intern in figuring out whodunit. But it isn't long before Kate's potential as an investigator is undermined by her intellect dropping to single digits partway in, compromised by a growing attraction to one of the suspects, whom she trusts too readily given the circumstances and her earlier skepticism about the River Point Boys. She does increasingly boneheaded things, taking increasingly implausible risks, to the point where I started to wonder just what she'd been doing as an intern in a law office for all these months. Heck, I wondered if she'd ever caught five minutes of any given law show on TV, because the things she ended up doing were so monumentally bone-headed that I can't believe she understood a single, solitary thing about anything. Meanwhile, the story keeps teasing the reader with interludes from the killer's point of view (written in a way to obscure their identity), in what starts as a nice way to raise tension but eventually becomes just tiresome. At some point, despite herself, the motive and culprit are unmasked, but not before Kate's ineptitude jeopardizes literally everything she's spent the entire novel working towards... after which she does even more inane things. I only finished because I didn't feel like swapping audiobooks by the time I lost all faith in Kate's ability to do anything but trip over her own metaphoric feet. The earlier parts worked well enough to barely keep it afloat at the Okay line of three stars.

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