OK so this was another weird one. Kids around England have their heads chopped off and stuffed into watermelons. The Muffin Man turns out to be the killer, and he’s got some kind of social commentary about fat, sugar, and salt? The question mark denotes my confusion. There are puzzles to solve, but I (and Alice) don’t know what’s real, and what’s imagined. At some points Alice wakes up crippled in the asylum, but neither of us know if that’s her reality, or if the crime fighting outside the asylum is. She has a boyfriend who is “maybe” dead, and maybe a figment of someone’s imagination? She ends up in a morgue and there are reanimated corpses, but not zombies. They’re just temporarily reanimated by the Cheshire (because he has nine lives – he can spread them out).
I put these two in the same review because I’m not sure I’d be able to string 250 words together for each book. There’s another murderer in this one, and I think the white rabbit is involved. There’s at least an exploding rabbit, and threat of murdering little kids and homeless people? Apparently the Mad Hatter is here too. There’s a backstory about what happened to our Alice earlier in her days, and something’s fishy about the bus accident where she “killed” all of her classmates. I don’t want to ruin anything (I’m not even sure I could?), so I won’t give too many details. I keep reading these books because they’re short and quick, but I’m always super confused 🙂