You’ve Been Summoned is a delightfully unique take on a typical mystery. Jane Parks finds herself in quite a predicament when she is invited to her twin sister’s party in a historic house despite also being invited on a romantic getaway weekend camping with her boyfriend. Fortunately, the two events take place close enough where Jane can make it between the locations with relative ease. During her treks back and forth, the unthinkable happens and Jane’s twin sister goes missing.
The fun twist with this novel, though, is that the reader is able to take advantage of the same information as the detectives and are given the opportunity to solve the case themselves. From suspect interviews to diary entries and character narration, the different types of clues offer a plethora of ways to solve the case of the missing twin sister.
This was such a fun and unexpected way to read a mystery novel. It was a nice change to read a mystery with the expectation to be able to solve the mystery myself, rather than having last minute information thrown at me out of nowhere. Treating the case as a series of case files, rather than a linear novel made it easy to separate the information and take a deeper look at it all individually.
The characters themselves fell a little flat, but that is probably because they are being looked at from the lens of a police case file instead of a story that is based on the lives of the characters. With such a large cast of characters, it was relatively easy to keep track of them, but more difficult to give them consistent personalities that made sense with the narration style.
⅘ stars for this uniquely interesting case that kept me questioning from start to finish.
Thank you to Netgalley and Experiment 42 for the opportunity to read this eARC in exchange for my honest review.
The Novel Llama 