In the YA thriller Little Creeping Things by Chelsea Ichaso, a teenage girl named Cassidy (Cass) overhears a potential murder and hunts for the victim. Cass, also known as Fire Girl, is haunted by her past where she may have accidentally killed her best friend. Unfortunately for Cass, the high school bullies don’t believe she’s innocent. She’s targeted as the unstable girl. Things change rapidly when Melody, one of the bullies, goes missing. Was Cass hiding nearby when the abductor struck? And did it go down the same way as she outlined in a notebook days before?
Cass needs answers to these questions. She doesn’t trust her best friend Gideon enough to tell him about her investigation, she withholds evidence from detectives because her knowledge implicates her, and she continues to have flashbacks to the fire from when she was a small child. As she becomes more and more alienated from those closest to her, she uses her reasoning skills to try to guess who the kidnapper, and potentially murderer, could be. As the suspects change from day to day, the pressure increases as the person behind Melody’s abduction is sending her messages implying they planned it together.
This is a great “backyard” YA thriller. By backyard I mean the setting never varies from the small town where Cass lives, and the suspects are all people who she’s grown up with. Messages about bullying, especially its lasting effects, ring true throughout the novel, and Cass is both a victim and perpetrator. As Cass dives deeper and deeper into the mystery, she finds her actions are destroying the personal relationships in her life.
At 237 pages, this medium-sized novel is a quick read, capturing the readers’ interest from page one while also keeping them guessing to the end. A well thought-out whodunnit, the final reveal will come as a shock to some but logically builds from what came before. The one distracting element is the writing style is very matter-of-fact—one sequence after another. However, the style doesn’t deter from the thrills and twists of the plot.
Also, Little Creeping Things doesn’t rely on most tropes of the genre. With the exception of an abandoned mill, the settings are typical of a small town. A diner, a school, a woods with a hideout, neighborhood homes—typical small-town fare. Like it’s title, this is a creepy novel, and it earns its chills not from placing it in graveyards or faux haunted houses.
An accessible thriller with a complex hero, Little Creeping Things is a novel for YA mystery readers to enjoy. A solid whodunnit with a realistic setting. It’s one to put on your to-read list.