Summary: Blood Will Tell

The GIST

Blood Will Tell by April Henry is a young adult mystery with a nasty hook: what if the kid who volunteers to help the police find evidence is the one the police decide did it? Published in June 2015 by Henry Holt, it is the second book in Henry's Point Last Seen series, following The Body in the Woods, and it brings back the same trio of teenagers from Portland Search and Rescue. Readers who have not met them before can start here without trouble; at least one young reviewer read the books out of order and never felt lost.

Henry has built a career on fast, tightly plotted thrillers for teens, among them The Girl Who Was Supposed to Die and The Night She Disappeared, and reviewers of the first book in this series praised both her skill at constructing a murder mystery and her evident knowledge of police procedure. Here she turns that knowledge on one of her own heroes. Kirkus compared the result to a solid episode of Law and Order or C.S.I., with one difference that makes it sting: we know the suspect, we like him, and we watch the ground give way beneath him one piece of circumstantial evidence at a time.

The Story

A promise and a warning

The book opens with blood. Fresh blood, we are told, is wet, shiny and startlingly red; newly exposed bone is a glowing, pearly white. Before the night is over, Nick Walker will see things that bring him to his knees. Before the week is over, he will do things he would have sworn were impossible, and he will learn truths he will desperately wish were lies.

A girl in ladybug boots

Then the story steps sideways to a seven-year-old named Mariana Chavez, lying on her back on a flat orange cart at Home Depot, looking up at the lights on the distant ceiling and admiring her new rain boots: red with black dots, with eyes and antennae on the toes, exactly like ladybugs. Her mother is frowning at rows of small metal and rubber parts, trying to work out which one will fix their dripping kitchen faucet. The apartment manager, Mr. Edmonds, is supposed to handle repairs, but ever since he made a leaking toilet worse, Mariana's mother has done them herself, with a good deal of muttering.

Mariana does not like Mr. Edmonds either, though for her own reasons. When her mother is not looking, he stares at her. He tells her how pretty she is and how much older than seven she seems. She thinks he looks like a tanned lizard.

Back home, as dark comes on, Mariana helps carry in the groceries, and her mother calls her a good girl and a good helper. Knowing that the next job will be holding a flashlight while her mother swears at a wrench, Mariana begs to go and play with her best friend Hector, who lives in the next building. Her mother gives in. But nobody answers Hector's door. Mariana is dragging her feet back down the walk when she spots a small black-and-gray-striped kitten, which takes one look at her and bolts around the corner. She loves kittens. If she brought this one home, maybe her mother would not say no this time. Hands out, she runs after it into the dark.

Ninety minutes later her mother phones Hector's family to send her home, and learns that they have only just got back themselves and have not seen Mariana at all. The narrator has already told us, in the first line of the chapter, that this night will end terribly for her.

Nick, Alexis and Ruby

This is the world Nick and his friends work in. All three are teen volunteers with Portland's Search and Rescue team, SAR for short, called out when someone is missing or when the police need a careful search for evidence. Each joined for a different reason.

Ruby is unusually smart, and drawn to the puzzle of a crime. Alexis likes knowing that she is really helping people. And Nick, an awkward kid who is not the most popular boy at school, has found in SAR the one place he feels at home. He also sees it as training. His father, he has always believed, was a soldier who earned a medal for bravery and died fighting for his country. Nick looks up to him and means to enlist and follow him, however firmly his mother says no. It has always struck him as odd that no one ever talks about the man.

Nick has a crush on Alexis. Alexis, for her part, has her mind on a boy named Bran, who has lately turned cold toward her for reasons she does not understand.

From searcher to suspect

Then a woman's body is found in a Portland park, about six blocks from the apartment where Nick lives. She has been stabbed. Nick thinks nothing of turning out with his team. It is what he does, and by now he has helped the police many times.

But this time the detectives begin looking hard at the searchers, and Nick does not look good. He lives close by. He collects knives. He loves first-person shooter video games. His school notebooks and his sketchbook are crammed with violent drawings. Circumstantial evidence appears to place him at the scene. Even his devotion to search and rescue gets turned inside out: a boy who signs up to look for bodies, the reasoning goes, must be a boy fascinated by violence.

Taken in for questioning about the murder of a woman he has never met, Nick does the worst thing an innocent person can do. He talks, and keeps talking, sure that if he only explains himself they will see the truth, while the detectives, who never read him his rights, press him to confess. It takes a call from Ruby to tell him to stop saying anything at all.

From there Nick's life comes apart. Secrets surface, including some about his own family. People he trusted pull away, and friends start to look like foes. And all the while, in chapters of his own, the real killer is speaking to us, watching the investigation fasten onto the wrong person.

Nick knows he is innocent. Knowing it and proving it are different things. With the police closing in on an arrest, it falls to Ruby and Alexis, and to Nick himself, to find proof that points somewhere else before it is too late.

What It's Really About

Underneath the chase, this is a book about how suspicion works. Nothing on the list against Nick is a crime. Owning knives, playing violent games, filling a notebook with dark pictures and being a bit of a loner describes a great many teenage boys. Stack those details together, add an address near a crime scene, and they harden into a profile. Henry shows how easily a story can be built around a person from the outside, and how hard it is to knock down once people have started to believe it.

It is also a quiet lesson in knowing your rights. One teenage reviewer, whose father works in law enforcement, was exasperated that Nick would not stop talking in the interview room, and used her review to remind readers that staying silent until a lawyer or guardian is present is sometimes the wisest way to protect yourself, however innocent you are. The publisher offers a teacher's guide for the novel, and scenes like that one are a natural place for a class discussion to start.

Then there is loyalty. Ruby and Alexis have to decide how well they really know their friend, and what they will risk on that belief. And there are the stories families tell. Nick has shaped his whole future around a picture of his father. The week that threatens his freedom also forces him to ask whether that picture is true, and readers report that what he finds is a surprise they did not see coming.

Readers enjoy the series for its mix of real procedure and real nerves: the methodical work of a search team, the pressure of an interview room, and a story that keeps switching among Nick, Ruby, Alexis and the killer. The reviews are honest about its limits. Kirkus called it sturdy if formulaic, felt that hearing from the killer gives away a little of the tension, and found the climax rushed, with action crowding out character. A teen blogger thought the romantic subplot unnecessary. Both agreed on the strength: the long, slow slide leading up to the finale, with the ground vanishing under Nick's feet, is solid, suspenseful entertainment. The same blogger guessed wrong about the killer, was gripping the book by the end, and went straight out to find another April Henry novel.

Who Should Read It

Teens, and adults who read alongside them, who like their mysteries quick, grounded and built on real police work, especially fans of crime shows who enjoy second-guessing the detectives. It suits younger teen readers as well as older ones, and anyone who has ever felt judged by appearances will feel for Nick. If you like a whodunit where you get to play along and may still guess wrong, this one delivers.