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.

In this one, we finally figure out what Aria did in Iceland. Took them long enough. And honestly? Feels kind of out of character for her and I didn’t like it. I mean sure, everyone else’s secret was a bit wild but I don’t know Aria’s wasn’t my favourite.

So while she was in Iceland, she ended up talking to this guy Olaf and he was telling her about this rare Van Gogh painting that some rich person kept to themselves so they decided to steal it.

I guess it is fitting to Aria’s personality but like I couldn’t see her actually stealing something lol. Anyway yeah, so Aria bails when alarms sound and Hanna comes to her rescue. She never hears from Olaf again until A sends her an article that he is missing. Yikes.

It wasn’t my favourite storyline but basically, A gives Aria a forgery of the Van Gogh making her believe it’s the one that was stolen and she was going to jail. Naturally, nothing else comes of this, it’s just something to make Aria sweat.

While this is going on, the girls all decide to get away from A by meeting up in this panic room at a property Spencer’s soon-to-be stepdad owns. They also get burner phones so that A is not able to text them anymore because that always works so well. A does manage to contact them a few times in the real world without text though because A is unstoppable.

The girls also decide to step up their game in finding out who A is. Well, they think it’s Alison, but they figure she has to be getting help since she can’t do everything alone. So their main suspect is Noel and I’m not gonna lie he has made the most sense. Plus he was shady on the TV show so I wouldn’t be surprised if he was involved. But Noel is Aria’s boyfriend so she refuses to believe he is suspicious. Even if he did sign her up to be the host of the prom decorating committee where the theme is Starry Night, exactly like the painting she supposedly stole in Iceland.

To help get more information, Spencer decides to reach out to this conspiracy theory blog that was writing about Alison’s disappearance case. Seems hella sketchy and suspicious but Spencer thinks this guy is legit and he provides some useful information to her.

For example, he says that since Alison managed to escape the fire, she probably needed medical attention and had someone helping her privately since she couldn’t go to the hospital. They go investigate where a private nurse is supposed to live but it ends up being a trap. This is when Spencer wonders if maybe Chase, the guy who runs the blog, isn’t who he says he is.

Things escalate further with them when Spencer begins to suspect he is A after he reveals he knew about Jamaica, even though Spencer had never told him that. So she runs away from him on the way to prom lol.

In the end, Chase reveals he is not who he said he was, he is actually Chase’s brother who is pretending to be him because the real Chase is embarrassed about his scars from when he was attacked by his own stalker in the past. It’s so farfetched and I’m rolling my eyes at this story but Spencer seems to forgive Chase, especially when he has evidence Alison might be alive. His evidence is some blurry surveillance video stills of someone who vaguely resembles Alison, not exactly solid proof but it’s something. It’s enough to get him back in Spencer’s good books anyway.

As for Emily, she’s decided to break Iris out of the Preserve because if anyone was going to know something it was going to be her. Iris was Alison’s former roommate at the Preserve as well as Hanna’s. At first, I did think Emily was going to fall for Iris too because that’s just what she does but the two remain platonic and even kind of friends.

At first, I didn’t want to trust Iris, I mean she seemed like the kind of person to take advantage of Emily and she was sort of but I was waiting for when she made a break for it and didn’t want to return to the Preserve or something dramatic. But really, she just wanted to live a bit of life and have fun, and I guess shoplift lol but hey, it could have been worse.

Iris reveals to Emily that Alison had a boyfriend when she was at the Preserve, she never mentioned his name but Iris would know him if she saw him. Iris said she only ever met him once, and it isn’t until they are at prom when Iris sees Noel’s prom king photo that she tells Emily that’s who Alison was dating. Yikes. A big red flag against Noel.

Meanwhile, Hanna has volunteered at the burn clinic again because that was where Graham – Tabitha’s ex from the cruise ship – was staying and the girls wanted to be the first ones to know when he woke up so they could find out what he was trying to tell Aria.

While Hanna is there, she makes friends with a girl called Kayla, they seem to really hit it off and bond which is nice. Hanna tells Kayla all about being nominated for prom queen and also about how she is really concerned about her friend Graham.

Cut to prom night when Hanna gets a call about how Graham has woken up so she rushes to the burn clinic to try to speak to him, all she manages to get out of him is that the person who set the bomb off on the ship’s name began with an N. This is because shortly after this Graham dies, which is just Hanna’s luck. But also what is suspicious is that Kayla was in the room with him.

At the same time, Aria confronts Noel about Alison because she had a feeling he wasn’t being honest with her and he revealed he had visited her at the Preserve and that he felt sorry for her. He clearly didn’t know the full story, but he tried to explain what he could to Aria but she didn’t want to hear it. The other girls show up soon when they find out Aria has run off with Noel because they also think he’s dangerous and manage to rescue Aria.

The next day, Hanna goes back to the burn clinic and finds out that Kayla had actually been murdered a few days ago, her body was found at the back of the clinic. This means that the girl that Hanna was talking to wasn’t Kayla at all but actually Alison?! Damn, the plot twist I was not expecting. I can’t believe Alison would have killed someone to impersonate her at the hospital. Then again, that’s exactly something she would do because she’s psycho.

Alison also leaves a note for Hanna to go to the school so the girls decide to go but also call the police because they are worried about what they might find. What they find inside the shed is Noel Khan, tied up and badly beaten up. Yikes. Looks like he’s not part of the A team at all…

And that’s where we end things. Naturally, the girls look suspicious AF for finding Noel in that situation and they are prime suspects. And A confirms to us that there are two of them working together to take down the girls, it’s just not Noel.

At this point, I have no idea who is helping Alison. I didn’t want to believe it was Noel because when the girls guess it’s someone they are usually wrong lol but he was making the most sense. Plus he did seem suspicious but that’s because the book wants you to believe he is you know?

Based on my knowledge from the TV show I can’t picture who it could be, mainly because Wren isn’t around anymore and has no connection to Alison. It also would be weird if it was Wilden because in the books he’s not even a cop anymore and is in a relationship with Melissa lol. I don’t know anyone else that they’ve really mentioned, I mean Naomi was in the clear from the last book too. So yeah, who knows? I guess we keep reading to find out.

We are starting off 2023 with our Pretty Little Liars and this time they’re on a cruise! Yeah it’s super random but I guess it’s nice to have a setting other than Rosewood every once in a while. Plus they think by going on a cruise, they’ll be free from A which we all know is just wishful thinking.

In this one we find out that Hanna’s big summer secret is that she was driving someone home after having had a drink at the bar and she ended up being run off the road and crashing. Yikes. Hanna was panicked because of her past with drunk driving and crashing cars she didn’t own so she called the girls and asked them to help move the girl who is in the passenger seat into the driver’s seat. Not the smartest idea but these girls don’t always make the best decisions.

I’m not going to lie, I am going to cut out talking about the actual cruise because there is nothing of worth about it, they might as well still be in Rosewood.

Anyway, the deal with Hanna’s hit and run situation is that the girl she was driving home turns out to be Naomi’s cousin. Naomi is one of the girls Hanna is on again/off again friends with as she navigates Rosewood popularity, and Naomi was also friends with the real Alison before Courtney took over and became friends with the Liars. This connection makes her the girls’ new prime A suspect.

Compared to the last people they thought was A, I think Naomi would make sense considering she is the same age as them and can get away with being around them when A related things happen. So I accept this compared to when they thought A was a grown ass woman that barely had any connection to them before Emily got pregnant.

The girls also believe that whoever A is has to have a helper, they can’t be everywhere at once. Which we all knew I mean mainly just from watching the TV show we know an A team can very much be in play.

I’ll put a pin in Naomi for now if only to mention briefly how dumb I think Emily’s new love interest is. I thought it was bad on the TV show when Emily had a new girlfriend every 5 minutes but it’s the same in the books. She always has someone. This time, it’s a random girl who is a stowaway on the boat called Jordan.

Long story short, Jordan is a wanted thief and she wants Emily to run away with her and Emily almost considers doing it but A calls the cops before they get a chance to escape. I honestly just roll my eyes anytime Emily meets someone new because she almost always ends up getting with them and they always remind her of Alison in some way or another. It’s boring at this point I need her to be a strong independent woman without all these troublemakers getting in the way.

As for Spencer, she is crushing on this guy called Reefer, who is a stoner she met at the Princeton thing from the last book. Not who I thought would be Spencer’s type but we go along with it. The issue she has though is that Naomi is also into Reefer? Again surprised as I didn’t think he would be Naomi’s type either but naturally there’s drama between the two as Naomi tries to steal Reefer from Spencer.

We also learn that Naomi was doing shady things to Spencer which seemed like things A would do to her which further proved the girls’ theory of her being A. For example, Spencer slipping on oil in front of Reefer and putting gum in her hair etc. Though it was weird so much was targeted at Spencer in comparison to the other girls. But good to know the girls were right about something lol. Apart from Naomi being A, she just wanted to win Reefer over by getting Spencer out of the picture she’s not out to torture the girls for real.

Then there is Aria, who has gotten herself tangled up with Tabitha’s ex boyfriend? Because of course he would be on the same cruise as the girls. Aria feels bad for what they did to Tabitha and so she thinks doing something nice for her ex might somehow bring her good karma? But really Aria should just learn when to leave things alone lol.

Also Noel gives Aria a necklace which he found on the beach and it turns out to be Tabitha’s. This seems sketch but at the same time could have been planted by A. We also see there is a photo of Tabitha and Alison together in the necklace which is weird but proves they knew each other and were friendly.

Anyway yeah, things turn weird with Aria and Graham – Tabitha’s ex – as he wants to talk to Aria about something serious but she is worried that he is A after the girls figure he’s probably the person working with Naomi. I don’t remember exactly what their reasoning was for these two people to work together but I imagine it wasn’t a very strong link. But once they think he’s dangerous and he’s trying to talk to Aria, she freaks out and runs away from him. He seems to act weirdly when he sees Aria’s necklace, which he has every right to be if it belonged to his old girlfriend.

So Aria runs away from him but he chases after her, it seems what he has to say is very important but Aria doesn’t want to hear it and locks herself down in near the ship’s control rooms. While she is there, an explosion in the ship goes off and so everyone has to evacuate. Great. Fun.

The girls meet up and talk and they think that A planted the necklace for Noel to find and give to Aria and now it makes them look even more guilty of murder, so their solution is to take a lifeboat out to the middle of the ocean and for Spencer to scuba dive into the deep ocean and leave the necklace down there for no one to find. This is so farfetched and dumb I was literally rolling my eyes so hard. Like first of all, it’s not safe and second of all just toss the necklace into the ocean anyway? Did it really need to be buried? Dumb.

Naturally, the plan backfires when the girls are all in the water and their lifeboat mysteriously deflates and they are stranded in the ocean. Thankfully Naomi comes to the rescue when she sees the girls go off-course. Which proves she’s not A because why would she save their lives if she was trying to destroy them?

It’s after this rescue mission that Hanna confesses to Naomi that she was the one who crashed her cousin’s car that night of the accident. She thought Naomi might have figured it out long ago and that was her motive for being A but it turns out that Naomi had no idea that Hanna was involved in the accident. So I would say that friendship bridge has well and truly been burnt down.

Though Naomi did reveal to Hanna that when Alison came back as Courtney she called Naomi and asked for her help to take down the girls. Naomi turned it down because she thought it was farfetched and ridiculous. So that’s interesting, makes you wonder what would have happened if she had said yes.

The girls talk and Aria wonders if maybe Graham wasn’t trying to hurt her but actually tell her who was. Before the explosion, he was trying to tell her someone was watching her or something like that, so she tries to look for him but overhears people talking about how he is in a coma. Yikes. Guess she won’t find out what he knows anytime soon.

When everyone returns to Rosewood the girls think it’s finally time to confess what they did to Tabitha. They are done dealing with A and all the drama and so they call up the lead in Tabitha’s investigation to turn themselves in. However as they are about to do this, they see on TV that there’s been a breakthrough in Tabitha’s case. They find out that she was killed by blunt force trauma to the head, not the fall from the bird’s nest. So Aria didn’t kill her, A did.

So the book ends with the girls decided not to confess to the murder because they didn’t commit it and them reconsidering what Emily was saying all this time about A being Alison. Especially because Emily finally confesses to leaving the door open for her in the Poconos.

Honestly, I feel like this was a wild goose chase over nothing. I mean it was interesting to learn about Naomi knowing about Alison the whole time she came back but nothing else came of it. Also I wonder what Graham saw? Though the likelihood of us finding out is slim. I guess we will have to read more to find out!

With only a few books left though, I am not sure how this all comes to a head, though I’d say a lot can happen in a few books in comparison to the TV show in which they really put the biggest load of nothing in for the finale episodes. So we keep going. I would like to wrap up the series in the first half of 2023. So I’ll be back very soon with another PLL recap.