Recently @KirkusReviews...

...I wrote about Susan McBride's Very Bad Things:

It’s a mystery set in a boarding school that involves a girl’s disappearance; a severed hand in a box; secret tunnels; blackmail; date rape; a star athlete set up not once, but twice; arson; an orphan who is adopted only to be orphaned again; a friendship that involves some serious one-way obsession; and, toward the end, some Phantom of the Opera–style action.

I should have loved it.

Holy cow, so many issues.

And last Thursday, I wrote about Rin Chupeco's The Girl from the Well:

If you’re at all squeamish, you’ll want to give Rin Chupeco’s The Girl From the Well a wide berth. If you prefer your narrators to be unequivocal White Hats, ditto. If seeing the aftermath of violence to women and children is a trigger, avoid. But. If you enjoy seeing child predators get their just desserts in Andrew Vachss’ Burke books, and if you liked the moral ambiguity of the title character in Anna Dressed in Blood—as well as the gruesome details of her rage-fueled violence—it may well be a good fit.