The city of Ludlow is gripped by the hottest July on record. The asphalt is melting, the birds are dying, petty crime is on the rise, and someone in Hannah Wagnor’s peaceful suburban community is killing girls.

For Hannah, the summer is a complicated one. Her best friend Lillian died six months ago, and Hannah just wants her life to go back to normal. But how can things be normal when Lillian’s ghost is haunting her bedroom, pushing her to investigate the mysterious string of murders? Hannah’s just trying to understand why her friend self-destructed, and where she fits now that Lillian isn’t there to save her a place among the social elite. And she must stop thinking about Finny Boone, the big, enigmatic delinquent whose main hobbies seem to include petty larceny and surprising acts of kindness.

With the entire city in a panic, Hannah soon finds herself drawn into a world of ghost girls and horrifying secrets. She realizes that only by confronting the Valentine Killer will she be able move on with her life—and it’s up to her to put together the pieces before he strikes again.

Paper Valentine is a hauntingly poetic tale of love and death by the New York Times bestselling author of The Replacement and The Space Between.

Wow. Wow. I cannot express how fantastic this book was. Just. Wow.

There are very few books out there that will leave me thinking for two weeks straight after finishing them. It takes a pretty good book to do that. And this book did it. For at *least* two weeks after I finished it, I was transfixed with it. It left me contemplating so many different things and ideas.

It had great characters and back stories, which is always good. But, wow, the plot twists. I’m usually pretty good at predicting the endings of books, but this one, it had me fully convinced of something that wasn’t true (I know that made no sense, but I can’t tell you what I mean, ’cause SPOILERS). I was so sucked into this book. It took me four hours to read, and I literally did not se it down after I had picked it up because I had to know what was going to happen. The writing was so realistic, at times I felt terrified as if I was really part of the plot, as if all of these things were happening to me, and it takes a pretty special book to do that. It very much reminded me of Jessica Warman’s Beautiful Lies* – which I highly recommend.

I give Paper Valentine 5 out of 5 scales.

Maddie