Schooled in Lies by Angela Henry

Synopsis
GED instructor Kendra Clayton's high school days were nothing to brag about. So she's not too thrilled when on top of having to take a class to renew her teaching certificate or be fired, she gets roped into serving on her high school's reunion committee.

Spending time with her former classmates is even less fun than having a root canal. Then to make matters worse, Kendra and the other committee members start receiving strange messages and having freak accidents. When one of the accidents results in a death, Kendra is convinced it's murder. Unfortunately, neither the reunion committee nor the police take her seriously.

To try and prevent another death-and to keep from worrying about all the time her sweetie, Carl, has been spending with his scheming ex-wife-Kendra digs into the lives of her fellow committee members and uncovers enough secrets, lies, and betrayal to make her head spin. When a second murder occurs, Kendra realizes she needs to watch her back in her search for the truth before a killer turns her into another buried secret.

My thoughts:
I read “Schooled in Lies” as part of a Pump up You Books Promotion Tour. I was interested in reading it because of it’s reference to school and the cover image. I think something about the apple and hands reminded me a bit of the cover for “Twilight”. It didn’t hit me until I was reading it that it reminded me of the other cover. There are so many different ways that a book can jump out at us, but I am glad that I decided to take part in this tour.

This is the fourth book in a series about Kendra Clayton. Kendra lives in a small town in Ohio and works as a teacher at a literacy center and as a hostess in a family restaurant. While I have not read the other books it seems that Kendra has a habit of finding murdered people and getting herself into sticky situations. She reminded me of an African American Stephanie Plum with her frequent mishaps.

Kendra is serving on high school reunion committee along with the current high school principal and some members of the popular clique. The reunion has been delayed for a year due to the old committee head’s death the year before. This time around new issues arise. The fund for the reunion has been emptied, the members start to get threatening letters and phone calls, lots of past secrets and hurts are revealed and uncovered, and the police get involved. There were a few sections that made me laugh out loud

This book moved at a very fast pace and I didn’t want to put it down. I felt like I was racing towards the conclusion and Henry did a good job of keeping the reader looking for clues. She threw in enough extraneous detours to keep you guessing as to the identity of the killer. My one complaint for the book does not have to do with the story but the editing of the final product. There were a lot of errors in the text, extra words in sentences and missing quotation marks. For me as a reader those mistakes are distracting and throw off the flow of my reading, especially the sentences that are missing words or have extra words because I stop reading by being thrown off by a sentence that doesn’t make sense. That said, I really enjoyed this book and would not let that one issue keep me from recommending it to other readers.

Product Details:
Pub. Date: December 2009
Publisher: Boulevard West Press
Format: Paperback, 354pp