Killer (Pretty Little Liars #6)

The prologue flashback is even less interesting this time, since it’s yet more information I do not want about the bloody flag-hunt business (see all of the last book). We also learn that Rosewood is the type of place that turns 6-year-olds learning to read into an official competition. Because if you can’t be the best at something, it’s not worth doing it at all. It also turns out that all 4 of the girls turned up at Alison’s house to steal her flag-piece at exactly the same time, independently of each other. I know there’s somewhat of a herd mentality at Rosewood, but that seems pretty impressive. Hopefully this psychic-bond all the children share will be developed later and the books will take a more Midwich Cuckoos (Village of the Damned) direction. Otherwise we learn nothing knew, and have some old and boring information hammered into our heads once again.

Back in the present we pick up exactly where we left off. Ian is still dead. We are clumsily reminded that we are now supposed to be suspicious of Officer Wilden, because Shepard says so. She neglects to say why, but that’s as standard. Then Ian’s body disappears, as tends to happen in these type of stories. Everyone immediately panics. Then the process of obsessive recapping begins.

There isn’t a great deal of forward momentum in the plot for the main bulk of the book. We learn that Aria has moved in with her father to avoid being sexually harassed by her mother’s boyfriend, failing to warn either her mother or anyone else about the borderline rapist who they all trust. Then Aria’s father suddenly declares that he has bought a house in the middle of the Rosewood Murder Triangle, but forgot to mention it earlier because it hadn’t occurred to Shepard yet. Emily’s boyfriend teaches her to eat peanut butter and honey butties, which are indeed nicer than peanut butter and jam, but don’t really add much to the story. We are reminded to suspect Jason, Alison’s brother, because he’s vaguely shouty and looks just like Alison. Hanna fondly reminisces about the time when the time when they were all children and Mike deliberately lurked about in the dark in the middle of the night to sexually assault Alison, but accidentally groped Hanna instead; she appears to find this sweet. Spencer’s dull essay storyline and her dull Andrew –the-obvious-boyfriend storyline continue to coalesce into one single lump of boredom. Everyone keeps going on about how much they want Ian to fry for Alison’s murder, which is not only cruel but inaccurate since although Pennsylvania, disturbingly enough, is one of the US states that still insists on the death penalty, their preferred method is lethal injection. Shepard keeps telling us what every boy in the series smells like in weird detail. We learn that only old ladies drink mint tea, which added to last book’s revelation that lesbians all drink jasmine tea makes me presume that there’s a very strict hot-drink hierarchy in Rosewood, which will hopefully be revealed in full in an exciting future volume of this series. Also, the Warhol banana appears again. I’m beginning to think it’s some type of a clue, it appears so frequently. Maybe Nico killed Alison?

The most exciting development is that it’s flag-hunt time again! Whilst we wait to find out how that thrilling saga will unravel, we are treated to endless scenes of Emily and her perfect boyfriend, who even loves the smell of chlorine in her hair, and who lives in a house with “Prayer Changes Everything” embroidered on the cushions. They possibly have sex, although it’s hard to tell because Ms Shepard never goes any further in her descriptions of these things than the boy involved touching the edge of the girl’s bra, which seems to be a bit of a fetish in Rosewood and also means another chance to describe clothes. Meanwhile Spencer arranges a meeting with a woman who the internet has told her is her birth mother, even though she hasn’t even asked if she’s adopted yet. To fill in time whilst waiting for this meeting she copies her father’s entire hard drive onto what is a very capacious CD in order to search it for adoption documents. Meanwhile her mother continues to disown her for being stalked and having had her best friend murderer, which constitutes top-quality parenting in Rosewood.

After a while the girls get together and conclude, pretty much by making it up as they go along, that Ian faked his own death in order to distract them whilst he escaped from Rosewood, but then stayed in Rosewood anyway. This makes no sense whatsoever. My theory is that Ian faked his own death because Sara Shepard needed a cliffhanger ending for Wicked Pretty Little Liars 5, which I think hangs together a lot better (the theory, not the awful book). Then everyone proceeds with their lives, eating branded foods I’ve never heard of and constantly just catching in the corner of their eye what might or might not be a stalker. Emily does that bad-drama scene where the heroine finds a picture of herself with the head cut off and panics, presuming that the photo’s owner is out to get her. She also receives an annoying ‘clue’ photo from ‘A’, which no one can be bothered with.

Spencer goes off to New York on her own to meet a stranger called Olivia who claims to be her birth mother, and they immediately go shopping for designer clothes. No questions are asked about this alleged adoption, which so far exists entirely in Spencer’s imagination, until they have thoroughly exhausted all the best shops. Eventually Olivia tells some vague story about giving Spencer away because as a rich and privileged eighteen-year-old she wasn’t sure she could cope with a baby. Immediately thereafter Spencer offers to finish school a year earlier and move to New York so they can be closer, and Olivia suggests renting her an apartment. I don’t know if this kind of behaviour is normal for rich people, but it’s definitely incredibly stupid. Then Olivia flies away in her personal helicopter, as you do, accidentally leaving Spencer with a mystery folder which sadly turns out to contain nothing interesting.

Aria becomes more proactive about her fetish for inappropriate men, deliberately hanging around a train station until she meets potential murderer and weirdo Jason and propositioning him. He immediately takes her to a bar named after the Bates Motel from Psycho Robert Bloch, which means that it would be too obvious if he were ‘A’. They immediately exchange secrets and flirt heavily. Hanna is meanwhile impressing Aria’s brother by her amazing knowledge of music, specifically that she has heard of Led Zeppelin. This is apparently quite impressive in Rosewood. More amazingly still she knows two of their songs and is able to sing along to them, which obviously makes her pretty cool. Mike is as creepy as ever, taking Hanna on a date to try on some tiny bikinis he has already picked out for her and then deliberately bursting in when she is changing. Luckily Hanna is flattered to have any male attention, since she is an idiot, and so doesn’t do anything about this. We also learn that whilst Mike was in Europe he learned how to say “underwear model” in Mandarin, which makes sense as long as you consider “abroad” to be one big place where all the people speak in the same set of funny languages which you can use to impress girls. Even though he is vilely sexist and is dating Hanna and Kate at the same time both of them continue to fight over him as though winning his brief approval of them as a sex object will validate them as a person and cement their victory over the other. It’s quite difficult to believe that two people could be this simultaneously stupid.

Plot becomes even more sparse as the book continues. Spencer’s parents horrify her by suggesting that she get a job. Hanna remembers something, but can’t remember what she remembers. In a particularly impressive show of idiocy Spencer decides to steal a large amount of money from her parents in order to rent a massively luxurious New York apartment. This makes sense because a man she has never met, who is married to the possible birth mother she has met once, will definitely reimburse her fully as soon as he finds out. Plus she feels entitled to the apartment because…actually, I’m not sure why. Just because. Many characters suddenly become emotional, start stuttering and leave the room for reasons not explained for several chapters. Isaac’s mother threatens Emily, but she doesn’t tell him for a while in order to drag matters out for a few more pages. When she does he immediately admits that his last girlfriend said the same thing, but is still certain that both his ex and Emily are crazy liars and the fact that they came up with the same fabrication is coincidence.

Hanna has yet another Haunted Oracular Dream which yields the first clue which sounds even vaguely interesting, Alighost’s: “Sometimes, I don’t notice I’m singing”. Which reminds me of a combination of Laura Palmer’s two dream clues “Sometimes my arms bend back.” and “Where we're from the birds sing a pretty song, and there's always music in the air” A finger-snapping dwarf and a mynah bird would really liven the story up around now, but sadly it is not to be. Instead we move on to some fluff about proms and dating, which takes a long time to go nowhere. Also at around this time the obsession with clothes reaches such a pitch that we’re informed that exact outfit a UPS delivery man is wearing as he makes a one-line appearance delivering organic baby booties. Meanwhile Jason, Jenna, Melissa and Officer Wilden continue to behave “suspiciously” whilst not actually doing anything that unusual or interesting. Somebody uses a Rottweiler to trick Aria into breaking into Jason’s house, which doesn’t seem to make any sense or achieve anything. Spencer’s supposed birth mother turns out to be a con-artist and steals all her university money, which I don’t care about and which entirely serves Spencer right. Mike finds out that Hanna is only using him, and hypocritically finds this offensive; simultaneously Hanna decides she is actually deeply in love with Mike after all. Then they make-up because they are both too vacant to hold a grudge. The whole thing is ridiculous.

As the end mercifully draws near everyone attends yet another of these benefit things that seem so popular with the rich and vain, delightfully enough held at what used to be a home for mentally ill children but is now a luxury hotel. Although it’s now refurbished the decorators have helpfully left a few rooms untouched, in order to allow a suitably overused gothic background for events. This is possibly another set stolen from the US Ring Ring 1 remake, although with clichés this ingrained it’s hard to identify a particular bad horror film. Emily blunders into one of these rooms, blunders upon an old inmate ledger full of sensitive information which has been left lying around in public view, and 5 seconds later finds Jason’s name. The whole thing is so far beyond terrible that there’s no criticism worth making .

Hanna however has decided that the murderer is Officer Wilden, on the basis that he has a hooded top and keeps singing the Elvis Costello song “Alison”, although sadly not the most appropriate lines:

Sometimes I wish that I could stop you from talking
When I hear the silly things that you say

Then it’s the usual conclusion, where the girls get together and voice their suspicions by reciting every single thing that has happened to them in this book, before racing crazily about in a panic because one of them is in danger. The potential victim is once again Spencer, who is at home in her barn reading The House of Mirth and demonstrating that she has failed to understand it by identifying with the heroine. However she quickly tires of her efforts to centre a classic work of literature around herself and starts to read her sister’s notes from school instead. Immediately she finds one with clues relevant to the drama currently occurring. Directly afterward the other girls arrive, and fugitive Ian turns out to be online at that exact moment waiting to answer their questions. He accuses Wilden and Jason whereupon Spencer, the world’s least credible witness, immediately changes her “memories” to fit this story. Then someone sets the barn on fire, just for a bit of drama at the end of the chapter. Everyone escapes this rather inefficient murder attempt instantly, and the four of them then run directly into the plot-twist I have been hoping for 6 books wasn’t coming. I reach new heights of despair, and the book ends.


Most Ridiculous Local Shops
Either

“the eco baby store …that sold organic baby booties made out of recycled soda bottles for a hundred dollars.”

“a pet store that sold homemade dog food and costumes for cats.”

“ “Just because the A notes weren’t coming from Ian’s phone doesn’t mean they weren’t coming from Ian… he could have gotten a disposable cell or a phone in another name.”
Emily put her finger to her lips. She hadn’t thought of that.”

“There was no way Jason abused Ali…. In fact, Jason had always seemed fiercely protective of Ali.”

Mike suggestively complimented Hanna on her sucking abilities and advised her to save some sucking power for later.

“Emily swallowed hard. She tasted peanut butter in her mouth, the sensation she always got when she was about to have a fight-or-flight reaction.”

“an oxygen facial”