Oh Amelia Anne...

If you are looking for some light feel-good weekend reading to perk you up, throw Amelia Anne is Dead and Gone by Kat Rosenfield in your closet immediately.

This is not a fuzzy kittens book. Only in the way that you will need several hours of fuzzy kitten therapy to scrub the grime from your soul.

Becca has everything figured out. She has a hot, disposable boyfriend from the wrong side of the tracks, a golden ticket to any university of her choosing and a plan to get out of her suffocating hometown. She is better than the sad, small-town losers who are were born and live and stay in Bridgeport.

But everything comes off the rails for Becca when a mystery girl, whose life is very much like her own, is found brutally murdered on the side of a country road.

This is a book about how one murder affects everything and everyone it touches. It exposes the evil simmering just below the surface of small towns, of small people and of Becca herself.

Here's a picture of Pekoe in a deerstalker to keep your spirits up

Dudes, this book was gritty. A little too gritty for this innocent Children's Librarian.

This is a book about human nastiness and cruelty. So everyone (especially Becca) is nasty and cruel to each other. There's a lot of sex and violence and hopelessness (and somewhere in the middle of this review I turned into Helen Lovejoy). Nancy Drew, this ain't.

Not to say that this isn't a great book. It has gotten a lot of buzz for a reason. The writing is terse, descriptive and lyrical. I could not put it down until I found out what had happened to Amelia Anne. It is a gripping mystery in the style of Ian Rankin or Minette Walters: The events and people are so awful, you can't look away.