Just Kill Me

Gr 10 Up—Eighteen-year-old Megan and her family run their own funeral home, where they handle everything from the embalming down to driving a hearse—one which Megan recently dented and needs to repair. Enter Cyn, Megan's childhood babysitter. Cyn and her boyfriend Ricardo run a ghost-tour bus around the Chicago area, where they show off real-life murder scenes to tourists. They offer Megan a job, and she finds that she's a perfect fit for the ghost-tour life. But at the end of one night's work, Ricardo casually invites Megan to go with the two of them on a side mission. Megan's new employers plan to murder an elderly woman. It turns out Cyn and Ricardo have been making their own ghosts for their tours. Megan's confused, but she sticks with the job, until she finds that she has a similarity to one ghost in particular. Cyn wouldn't be planning to kill Megan the way she and Ricardo have killed off old folks. Would she? This quirky YA novel has pacing problems, and the slow plot takes a long time to reveal any direction. Efforts made to show diversity in the cast, such as Ricardo being openly bisexual and Megan having a long-distance girlfriend, often feel like details that have been shoehorned in. The protagonists take part in typical mature teen activities, in addition to their gruesome endeavors, making this appropriate for older readers.