Finding a dead body is not normal. But Ava is not a normal teenager. In this chilling debut mystery, only the obsessive spirit of youth can save a sleepy town from the savagery within.

Fourteen-year-old Ava Bonney is unlike other children. She has an obsessive interest in the rate at which dead animals decompose. The motorway she lives by regularly offers up roadkill, and in the dead of night, Ava likes nothing more than to pull her latest discovery into her roadside den and record her findings.

One night, she stumbles across the body of her classmate Mickey Grant, and fearing that her secret ritual could be revealed, she makes an anonymous call to the police. When Detective Seth Delahaye is given the case, Ava won’t step back—not when teenagers in her sleepy South Birmingham town are going missing.

How hard can it be to track a killer?

Marie Tierney’s debut, Deadly Animals, is a beautiful novel about a small community’s descent into devastation and desperation—and the bravery of youth in the face of darkness.

I received an advance galley of this book courtesy of the publisher via NetGalley. All thoughts are my own.

I’ve read so many murder mysteries lately that I have grown a little tired of them, but I can honestly say that this book was absolutely riveting. For some reason, I kept getting “All the Colors of the Dark” vibes from some of the characters. Any of you who have followed my reviews for the last few months will know that that book is one of my top reads this year, so the comparison is a good thing!

The book is set in a sleepy town in South Birmingham, Ireland, in the 1980s and primarily focuses on 14-year-old Ava Bonney. Ava is not your average teenager in that she has a morbid fascination with decomposition – primarily the decomposition of dead animals. Ava likes to sneak out of her apartment at night and walk the road looking for roadkill. She will then take the dead animal to a secret area where she places it and then take notes on the rate of decay over several days. What Ava doesn’t know is that there’s also someone else lurking in the woods – someone with more sinister intent. When she discovers the body of her classmate, Mickey Grant, lying near her animal graveyard, she is faced with a dilemma – to reveal her secret obsession or stay silent and risk being implicated in a murder investigation.

The other main character is Detective Seth Delahaye, who takes on the murder investigation. Ava refuses to sit back and let others solve the mystery and uses the knowledge she has gained to do her own investigation. It’s not long before Delahaye and Ava team up to bring down who is killing teenagers in this small, sleepy town.

While the plot is pretty familiar to avid readers of serial killer thrillers, the characters are what really make this one shine. I absolutely loved both Ava and Detective Delahaye. Ava was whip-smart and very tough for a fourteen-year-old. She comes from a broken home and deals with an abusive mother, and I loved seeing her find a purpose. I also loved the relationship that developed between her and the detective, as he became a source of stability for her. She had a lot of adults in her life who had failed her, and she needed his trust and kindness.

The pacing of the novel is perfect, and I loved how it all unraveled. I am usually pretty good at figuring out who the killer is early on, but that wasn’t the case this time around. I was actually surprised by it. I also liked how the author used a mental health diagnosis that I had never heard of before. It made the story that much creepier. I was surprised to learn that this is a debut novel. I am definitely looking forward to reading more by this author in the future.

I had the pleasure of both reading and listening to this one, and I must say I absolutely loved the narrator. Olivia Dowd perfectly portrays all of the characters. She also does a great job hitting all the important beats and keeps the story moving.

I was really surprised by how much I loved this one. The story was captivating, the pacing was perfect, and I absolutely loved these characters. This is an impressive debut, and I look forward to reading more from this author. Fans of serial killer thrillers should definitely bump this one up on their TBR.