This one was so good. There was so much suspense and the pace was just right and I could not put it down.

So in this one, shit hits the fan. I mean is there any other way to say it?

The book starts out with the girls dealing with the fallout of what happened to Noel. Aria tries to find out if Noel knew more than he’s letting on, or maybe if she can figure out something else about Alison from the things Noel tells her but it ends up being a dead end. Noel said he had wanted to tell Aria about his friendship with Alison before but he didn’t know how to tell her and I guess they break up? I don’t think it’s said in so many words but it’s kind of just an understanding between them.

Meanwhile Mike confronts Hanna about everything that has been going on and guesses A is back, Hanna breaks down and tells him the truth. He wants to help catch Alison but Hanna doesn’t want him to get involved in case he gets hurt like Noel did. Not going to lie, this is kind of useless since Mike knowing didn’t serve any purpose in this book lol.

Spencer and Chase decide to check out the house from the surveillance photos of Alison that Chase had gotten before but it turns out to be a dead end – shocker. When has anything that has just fallen into the girls’ laps ever panned out?

Next thing you know everyone is being arrested lol. Yay. Looks like Alison got bored and decided to tip the police off about all their secrets. Spencer’s easy A drug habit, Hanna’s drunk driving, Aria’s painting thieving and Emily being in contact with Jordan who is a fugitive.

This is when the girls finally decide to break down and tell Agent Fuji about Alison and A and everything else going on in their lives. They hope that Agent Fuji will look past their crimes if it means them co-operating with the new investigation of finding Alison. They tell her about the notes they’ve been receiving, what happened to Tabitha in Jamaica, the whole nine yards. Agent Fuji agrees to help them and even gives them security detail to keep them safe in the meantime. Looks like things might actually be going their way for once.

Some time passes and nothing comes from Agent Fuji though Spencer is constantly calling for updates because she wants to know if there’s been any progress from the investigation. The girls have also been forwarding on any new messages from A they receive to Fuji. Each time the girls contact Fuji she always says the same thing, just that she is looking into things and let her do her job basically haha.

Unfortunately for the girls, Fuji does do her job and the girls end up being arrested again haha. This time for the murder of Tabitha Clark. Yikes. Fuji says that they were able to trace back all the A messages to the girls’ phones, implying they sent them to each other. She also says that the only DNA found on any physical note given to the girls by A was theirs. It’s not looking good for them.

Even worse than that evidence is that Fuji got security footage from a nearby hotel in Jamaica which shows the girls beating Tabitha to death…it’s hard to dispute that when the evidence is right in front of them.

I mean we all know that Alison is smart and worked hard to get the evidence to work in her favour, including creating a fake video of the girls and sending it to the FBI but Fuji and everyone else don’t believe them.

Thankfully though the girls don’t have to stay in jail while they await their trial as Spencer’s dad comes to the rescue and is able to get them out on bail. I guess this is nice and it’s nice to hear about Spencer’s dad, he’s been AWOL since Spencer’s mom dumped him after finding out about the Jessica DiLaurentis affair. But glad to see he is defending his daughter even if she is accused of murder.

The verdict is that the girls are guilty AF and will be sent to Jamaica for the trial which obviously doesn’t look good to the liars. Who wants to be kicked out of their hometown and their country to be trialed for a murder they didn’t commit in a foreign country?

No one is having a harder time with this than Emily, her family refuse to speak to her all of them believing she’s a liar and a murderer. Her sister calling her out for all her crap, refusing to take responsibility for her actions including her pregnancy which her sister helped her with last year. So Emily and her sister end up fighting which in turn causes Emily’s mum to have a heart attack?! Yeah I was not expecting that one.

Naturally her whole family blames her for this and refuse to acknowledge her as a person. I’m honestly surprised they didn’t kick her out of the house, they clearly care to some degree though since they were selling their possessions to get Emily out on bail.

Still, you can’t help but feel bad for the girl, she’s being tormented by the twin of a girl she loved, she had a teen pregnancy and is now being framed for murder and no one even believes her. Not to mention, A has been sending anonymous letters to all the loved ones the girls know implying they are going to commit suicide.

Emily concludes that this must be the only option since it’s what A wants, and she thinks her family would be better off if she wasn’t around to burden them.

Next thing you know, Spencer, Hanna and Aria are rushing to talk Emily off a ledge, literally. Like I’m sitting on the edge of my seat shook because I didn’t think Emily was really going to do it. I mean sure A pushed them to the brink but like despite everything I thought she would be strong.

Thankfully the girls get there and Emily doesn’t jump off the bridge, and the girls decide to go after Alison one last time. Might as well do everything they can to catch her before they get shipped out to Jamaica.

Aria decides to go back to Noel because she thinks there’s maybe something else he can do to help them. She asked him how he was able to contact her when she was out of the Preserve. Noel says there was a website he would go to and he would put in a fake order with a time and a place in the order notes of where he wanted to meet Alison. So they make a plan together to set up a trap with Alison.

Naturally, the plan does not work as Alison catches on and sends a decoy blonde to the meeting spot. The girls really thought they’d had her but as always she was one step ahead.

Cut to the day later when the girls might have figured out where Alison’s hiding spot might really be. Earlier in the book, Emily had received a voicemail from Alison and she was laughing but in the background they could hear some kind of chant. Hanna figured out the chant was from the protesters that had been all around Rosewood since Noel had been beaten up. The day Alison called, Hanna had been at her dad’s office and that’s where the protesters had been so the girls had another shot at finding Alison.

They go to where Tom Marin’s offices are and begin to look around, this is when they see that next to the office there is a rundown little building so they go and investigate. This is when they finally come face to face with Alison’s helper. Except it’s not who they were expecting, it is also no one that we know.

Alison’s helper is called Nick but to Emily he was Derek, the best friend she made the summer she was pregnant. To Spencer, it was Phineas the guy who sold her Easy A when she was in Philly. To Hanna, he was the bartender that was serving drinks the night she was run off the road. And to Aria, and the most surprising to me, he was Olaf, the guy who helped her steal the painting in Iceland. Damn. He’s been sneaky.

Alison soon appears next Nick and they both usher the girls into the basement of the rundown house they are in, inside they find a room with an Ali shrine in it, photos of her plastered along the walls. Emily smells something sweet in the air and realises they are being poisoned. Alison says she’s laid it all out perfectly to stage their suicide and is acting like a psycho. Though we all knew she was.

Also since the fire, Alison doesn’t look like the girl everyone knew and loved. Her skin is scarred from the fire, she’s missing a tooth and is looking worse for wear. I feel like this adds to how deranged she has become trying to get her revenge on these girls.

Emily, being the only one of the girls who seem to have any fight in her despite all of them being poisoned, tries to confront Alison and get her to release them but she’s not super successful.

Thankfully this is the one time the police were tracking the girls and they were able to come in and rescue them. Of course, Alison has vanished but Nick is lying unconscious on the ground so guess who is taking the blame for being A and killing Tabitha?

The girls get the charges against them dropped and are free to live their lives but can things really go back to normal when they know that Alison is still out there somewhere?

And that’s where we leave things. And I was honestly shocked that Nick was actually all of those people to the girls. I mean I had a feeling that he was someone always in the background lurking, I actually thought he might have been the cruise ship director guy they kept mentioning that time but then it was never brought up again. Though that would have been a role that was too obvious for him to be in if the girls all knew him in different contexts.

I was also amazed that Alison had even thought to create a fake video framing the girls for Tabitha’s murder like wow, we love a villain who is always thinking ahead, so much so that she had the backup plan to frame Nick if it all went wrong. Though we knew she would always throw her accomplice under the bus if it came to it.

I’m just surprised she got away before the police could find her. Not even a hair, fingerprint or anything that the police could trace back to her it’s wild.

But things are heating up and we only have two books left and I’m dying to know how it ends, I’m really hoping the girls can get more confrontation with Alison but will it happen? Probably not, not if she has anything to say about it.