Title: The June boys.
Author: Courtney C Stevens.
Genre: YA, mystery.
Publication date: March 3rd 2020.
Publisher: Thomas Nelson.
Synopsis:
The Gemini Thief could be anyone. Your
father, your mother, your best friend’s crazy uncle. Some country music star’s
deranged sister. Anyone.
The Gemini Thief is a serial kidnapper, who
takes three boys and holds them captive from June 1st to June 30th of the
following year. The June Boys endure thirteen months of being stolen, hidden, observed,
and fed before they are released, unharmed, by their masked captor. The Thief
is a pro, having eluded authorities for nearly a decade and taken at least
twelve boys.
Now Thea Delacroix has reason to believe the
Gemini Thief took a thirteenth victim: her cousin, Aulus McClaghen.
But the game changes when one of the kidnapped
boys turns up dead. Together with her boyfriend Nick and her best friends, Thea
is determined to find the Gemini Thief and the remaining boys before it’s too
late. Only she’s beginning to wonder something sinister, something repulsive,
something unbelievable, and yet, not impossible:
What if her father is the Gemini Thief?
Links:
GoodReads, Amazon, Bookdepository
My thoughts:
Rating: 3 stars!
I absolutely loved two of Courtney C Stevens other works, Dresscodes for small towns and Four Three Two One, so I kinda freaked out when I was approved for this ARC!
I knew going into this one that it would be very different from the other two books I read. But for some reason it still surprised me!
I kinda struggled with reading the beginning of this book. The kidnapping of Aulus has happened a year ago and one of the other boys who was also kidnapped has been found dead. So we start kinda in the middle of the story. There were quite some characters introduced and their relation to certain people, in a short period of time.
But once I got into the story, and got the characters straight, it definitely got better!
The main story we read from Thea´s perspective, were she, her two best friends, and her boyfriend try to solve the mystery around Aulus´s disappearance of the year before. But in between this story we also get letters from Aulus to someone. This part made the story so interesting. Because you do get some inside in his kidnapping story. But also these letters describe moments that haven´t happened yet in the main time line. So you keep wondering how we get from one situation to the other. This is definitely one of the reasons why I just had to keep reading the book!
I did get a bit worried when I had 100 pages of the book left. At this point I was convinced we knew who the kidnapper was, and everything pointed at it being true. We just didn’t know why. But since there were still 100 pages left, I thought Stevens would go and blame someone else, and I was worried it wouldn´t be as convincing.
In the end it did make sense, but I wasn’t too happy with the ending, which I will discus in this spoiler section.
Spoilers!!
We know that this time around 3 boys have been kidnapped besides Aulus. The fact that there are four boys kidnapped is weird, because normally there are only 3. In the beginning of the book one of these three boys has ben found dead, which is also weird, because normally all the boys returned alive. Later in the book another boy, friend of Aulus and Thea, is kidnapped. We read from Aulus perspective that they, all four of them, try to escape. Then right before they are free this friend says that he has never met these other two boys and that it was just in Aulus’ head. But we know they were actually kidnapped it was in the news etc. So maybe I missed something, but where the heck did these boys go to?!?!
The author:
Courtney “Court” Stevens grew up among rivers, cornfields, churches, and gossip in the small town south. She is a former adjunct professor, youth minister, Olympic torchbearer and bookseller at Parnassus Books. These days she writes coming-of-truth fiction and is the Community Outreach Manager for Warren County Public Library. She has a pet whale named Herman, a bandsaw named Rex, and several novels with her name on the spine.
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