4.5 stars
CBR17 Bingo: School (The Breakfast Club with murder. So much high school drama)
On a Monday afternoon, five high schoolers find themselves in detention after someone planted phones in their bags. They all claim the phones are not theirs, but the teacher is not listening. There is Cooper, the star athlete, with a promising career in baseball ahead of him. There is Addy, always perfectly put together and the homecoming princess. There is Nate, the school’s bad boy, who is on probation for dealing drugs. There is Bronwyn, most likely to become valedictorian and hoping for a spot at Yale, where several generations of her family have studied. And finally, there is Simon, who runs the school’s extremely accurate, and frequently cruel, gossip app. Everyone follows it, and while he may ruin reputations in the process, Simon never lies.
Less than an hour later, only four remain, after Simon is taken to the hospital after suffering severe anaphylactic shock. Strangely, while everyone was scrambling to try to save him, he didn’t appear to have an EPIPen in his bag, and every single EPIPen in the school nurse’s office was also found to be missing. By Monday evening, Simon is dead. The cause of death appears to have been peanut oil at the bottom of the paper cup he drank from, just before he collapsed. It was well known at school that he was deathly allergic to peanuts. The police don’t think his death is accidental, and as the four remaining students from detention are questioned by the police, it becomes clear that Simon had planned to reveal a deep, dark secret about each of them the next day, so they all have motives for wanting him dead. He just hadn’t had time to post the entry yet, but it’s there on his computer for them all to see.
Four teens, who previously barely spoke to one another, are now cast into the spotlight, all suspects in a murder investigation. Is one of them a ruthless murderer, or did someone else manage to sneak inside the classroom while everyone in there was distracted by a collision in the parking lot?
Full review here.
Blacked out the rest of my bingo card.