Jennifer Lynn Barnes

{My thoughts} – Tess Kendricks world is forced to change when she’s pushed into living with her sister Ivy in DC. This happens when Tess’ school calls Ivy to inform her that Tess has been missing a lot of school and hiding a major secret at home. She’d changed her whole life around in order to keep the secret a secret, but now with Ivy involved it’s no longer a secret anymore.

Tess’ grandfather the one that has been taking care of and raising her has his good and his bad days. The good days are few and far between now that the disease is progressing and has been untreated. Her grandfather has alzeimers and she’s been hiding it from the world.

Ivy has one conversation with him and she knows somethings wrong. By the end of the night her grandfather is in a home in Boston and Ivy and Tess are at her home in DC. Ivy already has Tess ready and enrolled in school. Ivy seems to be able to make things happen at an undeniable pace.

Ivy tries to keep her life with Tess separate from her job, but that’s not easy. Tess is curious and gets herself involved in ways Ivy couldn’t have calculated to be possible.

At her first day of school she meets Vivvie. Vivvie is the one to pull Tess down the rabbit hole into the world Ivy was trying to keep Tess out of, the world where people have secrets, people keep things from one another, people blackmail each other and they simply know things that they probably shouldn’t. When it comes down to it in DC there is a lot people know that they shouldn’t.

Tess goes from the simple life on a ranch with her grandfather to this complex life in DC with her sister that seems to be primarily based on who knows who and how much they should and shouldn’t know and what to use against one another.

In Vivvie’s case she needs help with a problem and since Tess’ sister fixes problems she hopes Tess can help her. Tess tries and she involves three other students in their grade Asher, Henry and Emilia. It turns out it was too big of a problem and they ended up going to Ivy who instructed them to stay out of it, obviously they did the complete opposite. Teenage curious minds, who could blame them?

Once Ivy latched onto the problem a lot of things happened at once. Vivvie, Henry, Asher and Tess all had life changing situations occur to them. However through all of it they sort of managed to remain friends, considering everything that did happen. Tess also learns a lot more about herself, her family and who she is and where she comes from.

The last of the chapters ties up the situation that Ivy had been working to fix. You learn a lot of information in these last chapters, but it doesn’t appear to be rushed or overwhelming. It also leaves you with a cliff hanger type ending as well.

I really enjoyed reading this book, it covers thriller, mystery etc in such a way that it kept me wanting to continue reading in order to figure out what was what and where to go from here and there kind of things. Highly enjoyable book and I do recommend it to other readers with similar reading interests. I also look forward to reading the next book in this series called the long game due to come out in June of 2016.… (more)