The Murder of Bindy Mackenzie
By: Jaclyn Moriarty
Pages:491

This book is a companion to “The Year of Secret Assignments” – although there really is no connection to it. The reader is introduce to Bindy Mackenzie, the nerd girl at Ashbury High. She excels in all her classes and earns and average of 99.9%, sadly she is not one of the most loved people at her school. Recently, she enrolled in a new course being offered – the Friendship and Development Project. Apparently, this class (consisted of 6 other students) is supposed to be a “life raft” for each other, and a place where they will provide support and chat about issues facing adolescents. Bindy sees no reason for her to join such a group and finds it all rubbish. She starts bad-talking about the members in her FAD group, and soon got everyone to turn against her. Then, all life starts falling apart; she begins to have hallucinations, fail exams, skip classes – and she doesn’t care at all. (Okay, here is the part that is a little weird, you will have to read the story to get it). So back to the plot synopsis about her life falling apart, theses are all signs showing that she is slowly dying. How could she be dying? Who would want to kill her? Why are they killing her?

I was a bit confused about the relation between the title and the story in the first place. It wasn’t until I read 3/4 of the book did I finally got the meaning. This is because the title makes it sound like it is a mystery book with detectives and all that, but the writing sounded like a regular high school fiction with a nerd girl cast for the main role. Like the first book the author wrote, this is not told in narrative perspective. Presented in the form of letters, transcripts, diary entries, emails, and other documents, this story has a plot line which matches that of “The Year of the Secret Assignments”. A definite excellent read!
Rating: 8.5/10

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