Blog Tour Review: We’ll Never Tell by Wendy Heard

⭐⭐⭐⭐

Rating: 3.5 out of 5.

Mysterious and a little bit haunting

Thank you so much to TBR and Beyond Tours and Wendy Heard for allowing me to be part of this experience and also providing me with a complimentary eBook and media kit!

Book Information

Genre: YA Mystery Thriller
Publishing Date: May 16, 2023

An ambitious and juicy whodunit doused in Hollywood lore, perfect for readers of sexy summer thrillers like The Twin by Natasha Preston and The Agathas by Kathleen Glasgow and Liz Lawson.

No one at Hollywood High knows who’s behind We’ll Never Tell—a viral YouTube channel where the anonymous creators trespass behind the scenes of LA’s most intriguing locales. The team includes CASEY, quiet researcher and trivia champ; JACOB, voice narrator and video editor, who is secretly dating EDDIE, aspiring filmmaker; and ZOE, coder and breaking-and-entering extraordinaire.

Now senior year is winding down, and with their lives heading in different directions, the YouTubers vow to go out with a bang. Their last episode will be filmed at the infamous Valentini “murder house,” which has been left abandoned, bloodstained, and untouched since a shocking murder/suicide in 1972. When the teens break in, they capture epic footage. But someone trips an alarm, and it’s a mad dash to get out before the police arrive—at which point they realize only three of them escaped instead of four. Jacob is still inside, slain and bleeding out. Is his attack connected to the historic murder, or is one of their crew responsible?

A week of suspicions and cover-ups unfolds as Casey and her remaining friends try to stay alive long enough to solve murder mysteries past and present. If they do, their friendship may not survive. If they don’t, the house will claim more victims.

Book Links

• Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/62315614
• Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0316482331/
• Barnes & Noble: https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/well-never-tell-wendy-heard/1142157093
• Indigo: https://www.chapters.indigo.ca/en-ca/books/well-never-tell/9780316482332-item.html
• IndieBound: https://bookshop.org/p/books/we-ll-never-tell/18946074

Content and Trigger Warnings

For a list of warnings, tropes, and representation for this series, check out BookTriggerWarnings.com.

About the Author

Wendy Heard is the author of suspense and thrillers for adults and teens, including THE KILL CLUB, SHE’S TOO PRETTY TO BURN, and DEAD END GIRLS. Wendy has spent most of her life in Los Angeles, California, which is on fire more than she would honestly prefer, and can often be found haunting local hiking trails and bookstores. She loves all things vintage and has a collection of thrillers and adventure books from the 80s.

Author Links:

• Website: https://www.wendyheard.com/
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/wendydheard
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/wendydheard/
• Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/17011089.Wendy_Heard
• TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@wendydheard

Review (no spoilers)

If you’d like to follow along with the rest of the tour, you can find the tour schedule here.

Hey everyone! I’m back with another review for a book written by Wendy Heard. I read and reviewed one of her previous novels, Dead End Girls, so if you’d like to check out that review, you can find it here.

We’ll Never Tell is a book about 4 seniors, who run a YouTube channel where they break into locked places at night to show their audience a behind-the-scenes view of these locations. When one of them suggests that their finale should take place at their local murder house, they begin to plan the perfect crime. Once they break it, however, things begin going wrong almost immediately, and one of them is left bleeding out on the floor while the other three are forced to flee. If they want to figure out what happened, they’ll need to unravel the secrets that the house holds.

This book is a great choice for fans of YA mystery/thriller novels. Wendy Heard has definitely embedded herself into this genre, with all of her books being written for audiences who are looking for something that they won’t be able to put down.

The plot follows several timelines. We get glimpses into the original 1972 murder-suicide via things like letters and newspaper articles, and some chapters from a “two weeks ago” perspective are also sprinkled into the main narration. The story mostly follows the main character, Casey, as she attempts to figure out what exactly happened on that fateful night. Her research takes her down some crazy rabbit holes involving many deaths and a possible death curse.

My main complaint with this story was the fact that I felt like too many things were happening at once. There are two cases that Casey is attempting to solve throughout the book (the one from 1972 and the one from the present), and her exploration into both of these cases introduce a lot of side stories involving things like family drama, exploration of sexualities/relationships, and PTSD. Because the author attempted to cover such a vast amount of topics, I felt like none of them really got the depth that they deserved. I also felt like this meant that I didn’t have a solid hold on who these characters were. The ending of the book wrapped everything up in a way that felt too clean and insubstantial.

Many YA thrillers tend to be around 300-350 pages long, and this one is no different. While the shorter lengths allow for the pacing to be fast and thrilling, I think this could have benefitted from either being longer, or by removing some of the many twists/turns along the way. Regardless, reading this novel did satisfy the mystery/thriller itch.