Revenge from the Grave

Summary Short: Girl kills herself. Revenge is taken. The reader finds out by who in the end.

A girl hangs from a beam in the garage, found by her father.

“And because of the shame that accompanies suicide, the Ryans severed all ties with their extended family, friends and neighbors.”

It is a case of cyber bullying and whoever was responsible so many years ago, had gotten away with pushing a person over the edge, to her death. Not so. Someone remembers what happened very well and that someone is taking revenge in a most unconventional way.

Twelve years later, Caitlin Rourke steps into the story of revenge without knowing it. She becomes immersed in the story of a councilman who has just lost his political career due to being found with drugs in his system and a prostitute in the passenger seat of the car he has just driven through a hotel lobby.

What follows is the spread of wrongdoing among some highly respected men in the community and eventually the trail that leads back to Alexis, the girl who committed suicide and the one who never forgot her.

I wish the author would have developed the character of Alexis and let me get to know her so the suicide would have meant something. I think she could have really run with the quoted sentence above, showing how suicide isolated the family of Alexis and I could have rooted against the person(s) who caused her to feel there was no reason to live. That would have added another dimension to the story. Even so, I did enjoy reading as Caitlin, the reporter went about figuring things out.

This book brings about the problems of the “connected” world we live in today: cyber bullying, sexting and how easy it is for a teenage girl to share photos of herself, not understanding where they may go afterward. The book focuses more on the legal affect it would have on the grown men who buy these photos, not on the girls themselves. As the title suggests, it is a book about revenge.