Aside from an issue I have with the very end of the book, I really enjoyed this twisty mystery. The plot is tightly crafted to keep you guessing about true identities, grudges, and actions. I like the conceit of showing the investigation into Giselle's disappearance in reverse because I feel like that gave me a better chance to catch some clues as they arose since you already (sort of) knew what the outcome would be. It's obviously meant more for high school with all the drinking and some swearing, but I wish it was appropriate for my middle schoolers. They would eat up the intrigue! Spoiler - I don't believe that Giselle would let Maggie leave at the end. She has been very careful about tying up all her loose ends and leaving Maggie alive is the biggest loose end ever.

We open after a murder has taken place. Maggie stares at her hands, desperately trying to remember the night before, questioning if she had what it takes to push someone to their death.

I was instantly drawn into Dead Below Deck. Jan Gangsei presents the story anachronistically, telling Maggie’s story backwards and Giselle’s story forwards (by way of journal entries), while also peppering in some current timeline tidbits like news stories and police interviews.

It was a great way to show us the whole story.

Telling Maggie’s story backward worked well, I was constantly highlighting and wondering what would come up next that would help to explain what felt like crytpic sentences.

Giselle’s story, however, didn’t work as well. It was presented as a journal in which Giselle wrote letters to her dead mom. But the voice of it doesn’t feel like a journal entry as much as it does narration. I think it could have worked to get the story out without the guise of that format.

Emi and Viv, the two other main players in the story and Giselle’s best friends also work really well as suspects as we get to know Maggie better and realize she most likely did not kill Giselle.

SPOILER WARNING!

My biggest gripe was the ending. Giselle planned the whole thing and framed Maggie because she thought Maggie was seeing her secret ex-boyfriend Wyatt. Which seemed unecessarily petty to me.

We also learn, from Maggie realizing it and Giselle confirming it in their ending conversation, that Giselle’s little brother is actually her son. This felt like it was added for shock value and I think we really needed to see her interact with him more for it to have any real value to the narrative.

So, while the ending wasn’t great, the rest of the book definitely kept me on my toes and switching sides.

This was a great beach read. It’s the story of a group of “friends” who go on a yacht and one of them ends up overboard while the other is suspected of murder.
I really enjoyed the pacing and timeline of the story. We found out about each character in an order that added to the suspense.
I would have loved to see a little more of the relationship between Giselle and Wyatt since it played such a role in the story.
Vivian’s and Emi’s stories also felt a little unfinished. I wanted to know how they ended up—however, leaving the story the way it was and having Maggie walk off with the plans to destroy everything was definitely a satisfying ending.

Dead Below Deck was a twisty mystery told in a unique way.
The book opens with a yacht and a missing girl. The main story is told in reverse chronological order. The end of each chapter also has letters that read chronologically, but begin long before the yacht leaves. There are also police interviews and news transcripts that begin after the girl goes missing and delve into the investigation.
It was fun gathering all of the pieces to try to solve the mystery, and this kept me turning pages. Is anything as it seems?

Thanks to Netgalley and HarperCollins for an early copy for review.

I love YA like Dead Below Deck. There are plenty of plot twists and it has a really creative angle. The reverse chronological narrative is very cool and much easier to follow than I expected. I wasn't crazy about the diary entries (a trope that's a hard sell for me, in general) and I think the setup would have been much cooler if the author pulled it all off from Maggie's perspective. Nevertheless, this was still a fun read.

4.8 stars! Very creative move to tell the story in reverse chronological order. The timeline and pacing are excellent. The setting is brilliant and enticing. I could figure out some of the twists and not all of them, which makes this YA text a really fun read. The characters aren't the most deeply developed. The ending is ... Read this book and see for yourself!

Potentially easy to predict for regular mystery / thriller readers but nonetheless, I was invested and had a good time with Dead Below Deck by Jan Gangsei. Any book that starts with action has my attention, and we're immediately presented with a 'overboard and presumed dead at sea' scenario in which the suspected killer is still on board. And telling the story.

I love a good setting of (extraordinarily) rich teens at a boarding school or in other exceptional settings - in this case, on a yacht trip for spring break. We get the the best of both worlds here, because we have the current timeline of events as told from the POV of Maggie, still on the yacht and presumed to be the killer trying to prove her innocence, while we have the flashback while at boarding school storyline via diary entries from Giselle, who went overboard. All the while, we're trying to piece together who would want Giselle dead (well, everyone, really) and how the little hints and puzzle pieces left in the diary fit in with the current events.

There were a great number of details and red herrings to remember, which is always a really fun part of mysteries, but occasionally ran up against a wall of being too repetitive on some of them which made the ending more obvious to guess.

I flew through this one, so overall I do recommend it if you enjoy the genre and want a fast, fun read.