Chelsea Sedoti writes a mesmerizing young adult mystery in Tell Me What Really Happened. Part of the intrigue is her use of only the voices of the four friends of Maylee, the murder victim, as they answer interrogation questions in solitary first person police interviews. Maylee winds up dead when the group of teenagers makes a camping trip to a remote area that has a reputation for mysterious happenings. Maylee’s murderer has to be one of the other four people on the trip.
In an interesting setup, each chapter begins with the interrogator’s question. Answers come from Petra who has a controlling personality and claims to be Maylee’s best friend, her stepbrother Nolan who is sure they will find Bigfoot in the area, Abigail who got an unexpected invitation to join the group on this trip, and John who is Maylee’s boyfriend. Needless to say, the answers do not always coincide. They do reveal the well-drawn characters of each member of the group, all of them suspects.
The answers of these suspects reveal true teenage character types and anxieties along with poor choices as they struggle to ease the angst that goes with that time of life. The reader gets caught up in those as well as in the mystery of whodunit. I found the technique of writing the story in this format equally intriguing to solving for the guilty party.