**This blog contains adult language.**
Warning: Spoilers Ahead!!! This is a recap blog which means I read the book and tell you everything that happens so you don't have to read it yourself. Please do not continue to read if you don't want to know who the “bad guy” is.
From the Back of the Book: This summer's going to be a real killer. Sand. Surf. Sun. Roxie lives for the summer. But this summer things aren't going the way Roxie planned. It all started when she broke into Lee Blume's house just to win a stupid bet. Because while she was in Lee's house, Roxie saw something she shouldn't have seen. Heard something she shouldn't have heard. And now someone's looking for Roxie. Someone who wants her...dead.
This book was published in 1994 and this is my first time reading it. I love the cover. I wish books would go back to these.
📢TRIGGER WARNING: There is an animal murder in this book. I won't go into too much detail but it was gruesome and unnecessary. I'm disappointed in Stine.
We begin with our protagonist Roxie. She's upstairs – somewhere – listening to an argument down below. She can hear arguing and the sound of someone being slapped. Roxie tells us she broke into the house because of a bet and now she's trapped. She hears more fighting and wonders if she's going to hear a murder.
The prologue ends and Chapter One has Roxie and her friend Ursula playing tennis. I think we went back in time but Stine doesn't really make it clear. Ursula is described as tall, pretty and competitive but Roxie says she's a good friend. They talk about Roxie's boyfriend Terry for a few minutes. He's spending the summer delivering fish for his dad's shop. Ursula doesn't like Terry because he's a goofball.
Ursula is spending her summer working in the school office transferring paper files into the computer. Ah, yes, the great file migrations of the 90's.
Roxie has to go to summer school for French. Stine drops the “R” word here to indicate that Roxie is way behind in the class. The 1900's was such a different time. I won't pretend I wasn't guilty of this. My friends and I threw that word around like confetti back in the 80's because we heard it in pop culture a lot and we wanted to emulate what we heard. I know better now. I'm sure Stine does too.
Hopefully.
Suddenly a girl named Shawna runs up screaming for help. Her clothes are covered in blood.
{{{GASP}}}
Mini-LOLZ?
She definitely needs medical attention but no one is dead or anything. She and her boyfriend Lee were on his boat when he broke up with her out of the blue. She tried to hit him but ended up cutting her wrist on the side of the boat. Except....a few paragraphs later, Stine says she cut it on the blade of the motor which is a much different thing.
Stine loses complete track of his own story? Check.
Keep it straight, dude.
The girls wrap her wrist up in a towel or something and drive her to the hospital. Roxie thinks about Lee on the way. She has a major crush on him despite the fact she's dating someone else and I feel a case of Cheater Fever coming on. Lee is described as 'mysterious, moody and attractive' with an earring and a Sharks cap that he never takes off. Essentially, he's the exact opposite of Terry and the grass is always greener blah, blah, blah.
Shawna says several times that Lee has a really bad temper which Roxie just seems to dismiss because of course she does.
We skip ahead two days. Roxie and Ursula are walking along the beach when they run into Lee. Ursula immediately starts flirting with him which pisses Roxie off. To be fair, Roxie has a boyfriend so Ursula thinks she's in the clear to hook up with Lee.
Lee offers them a ride on his “cigarette boat” whatever the hell that is.
So according to Wikipedia, cigarette boats are also known as 'go-fast boats'. They are long, narrow speedboats that are designed to navigate rough waters and were often used to smuggle illegal substances.
I wonder if Stine gave him that boat in particular to make him seem even more shady?
The girls agree to get on this boat with him despite the fact that Shawna told them just a few days before that Lee is unpredictable and has a bad temper. I mean, he's hot and mysterious and that's enough for a teenage girl to ignore the warnings of her friend, right? Lee takes them out pretty far into the water and then the engine stops. Lee declares that it's broken and they're drifting out to sea.
{{{GASP}}}
LOLZ
He was just messing with them. The engine is fine. Roxie accuses him of playing a really mean trick and he replies: “I'm a real mean dude”. She ignores this. She shouldn't. People often tell you and show you exactly who they are.
We just skip from there to the next day. Roxie goes to her summer school class and then meets Ursula in the office. Ursula has Lee's file sitting on her desk and Roxie asks her what she's doing with it. Ursula flat out admits that she was using it to unethically obtain Lee's home address. Roxie makes note of it too. Ursula jokes that she's going to tell Terry that Roxie has a crush on Lee. Roxie threatens to tell the entire school that Ursula isn't a natural blonde as if that's a huge scandal. I went to school with a bunch of fake blondes and no one ever batted an eye about it. Ursula seems upset by it even though it's not true and she IS a natural blonde.
I'm getting tired of these two already.
Ursula bets Roxie that she can get a date with Lee first. Roxie says a date is too easy because apparently Lee will go out with anyone who asks. She says that the bet should be to get Lee's Sharks cap and to wear it to the school the next day. Ursula agrees and they set the stakes at $50. I don't know a single teenager in the early 90's that just had $50 laying around but maybe I just had poor friends.
We skip ahead an undefined amount of time. Roxie is walking along the beach with Terry when she sees Ursula in the distance talking to Lee. Roxie is terrified that Ursula might win the bet, so she ditches Terry and runs over there. She's so caught up in things that she considers pushing Ursula off the dock but manages to restrain herself. She decides she needs to come up with a nefarious plan to win the bet.
Lee mentions having to go to a charity thing with his parents that night at the country club so Roxie decides to break into his house to steal the Sharks cap. She figures there's no way his parents will allow him to wear it to the club so it will be in his bedroom. She's going to tell Ursula that she ran into Lee after the event and went back to his house with him where he gave her the cap. She is going to take a camera with her to snap pics of Lee's bedroom to make it sound more believable. She knows that winning the bet this way is cheating but she doesn't care because Ursula is beautiful and that's not fair either.
First of all, what kind of logic is that? Second, cheating is the least of the crimes here. We have breaking and entering and theft to deal with as well, sweetie.
We skip to that evening. Roxie finds an unlocked side door and goes in. It's dark and she's fumbling around. Her hands brush up against cold, damp hair and she knows she just discovered a dead body.
{{{GASP}}}
LOLZ
It's a mop.
Roxie finds Lee's room and takes pics. She searching for the cap when she hears the door open downstairs and suddenly we're getting the scene from the prologue. Roxie hears a girl screaming “let me go” and the sounds of someone being slapped. Things crash. More screaming. Roxie runs for the door.
All the lights are off downstairs which means these two people entered a dark house and didn't bother to turn on any lights. Weird. Roxie can sense two people in the living room as she passes, so she aims her camera in there and takes a picture. In the light of the flash, she sees a girl with curly hair in an updo and an angry looking boy. She assumes the boy is Lee but she doesn't really get a good look at him. She runs out of the house and absolutely no one pursues her.
We skip to the next morning. Shawna calls and wakes Roxie up to see if she's heard about what happened to Ursula. Roxie panics that Ursula was murdered in Lee's house the night before.
{{{GASP}}}
LOLZ
Ursula sprained her back windsurfing.
Roxie goes downstairs and just happens to turn on the news right when they're talking about the body of a teenage girl being found on the beach. The description matches the girl Roxie saw in Lee's living room.
Wait.
So, the bad guy started to kill her, got interrupted by an intruder who seemingly took a picture of him with the victim, and then just went ahead and killed her after the intruder ran off with said incriminating picture?
Sure. Makes sense.
Roxie figures she'll be murdered next since she's a witness. She drops the film off to be developed and then wanders around for an hour while she waits to pick the pictures up. It's boring. When she gets them back, she finds that the picture she took only caught the living room ceiling.
Roxie goes home and gets in her car. She drives around for awhile and somehow ends up at the crime scene she heard about earlier. For some reason, the body bag is still there and the police are still processing the scene. This makes no fucking sense. It's been hours since she heard that news report. There's no way the body would still be there. Roxie joins the crowd that's being allowed to spectate. She watches in horror as the body in the bag starts to move.
{{{GASP}}}
LOLZ
The police are just dragging it across the ground. Dragging it. Not only would that be disrespectful, it would potentially cause damage to the body that could fuck up their evidence. Not only are the assholes dragging it, but they didn't even zip it up apparently (which is a good way to lose or contaminate your evidence further) and the body starts to fall out of the bag. Roxie sees the curly updo and starts screaming.
Later Roxie goes to her father for advice (he's a lawyer). She tells him that she went to see Lee last night and the front door was open and she heard a girl scream through the opening. She tells him that she saw Lee and the girl fighting even though she never saw Lee at all. Her dad chastises her for not telling anyone or calling the police.
Roxie's dad takes her to the police station. They get to the investigating officer's office and he immediately pulls out cuffs and says Roxie is under arrest for murder.
{{{GASP}}}
LOLZ
He's joking.
This isn't really a time for joking, sir. A teenage girl is dead. Your detectives DRAGGED her body across the ground, spilling her out of her body bag in front of civilians who are probably hella traumatized right now. Read the room.
Roxie tells Chief Harms the fake story she told her dad. We don't actually get any of that scene but we hear about it later when she's telling Shawna that the police are going to question Lee. Shawna warns Roxie that she's probably a target now and reminds her that Lee has a bad temper.
We skip to the next day. Ursula is back to work so Roxie drops in after class. Ursula takes lunch and Roxie fills her in. They're both convinced that Lee will be arrested and convicted.
Later, Roxie runs into Lee on the beach. He ominously tells her that he saw her.
{{{GASP}}}
LOLZ
He just saw her headed to summer school earlier. He tries to make small talk with her but Roxie is being hella awkward about it. She goes to leave and Lee grabs her around the throat.
{{{GASP}}}
LOLZ
He was just reaching out to touch her locket like a creep. Roxie thinks he's toying with her. She takes off.
At dinner, Roxie demands to know why Lee isn't in jail . Her father says that several people came forward to swear that Lee never left the country club during the time in question. Plus Roxie never actually saw him.
Wait.
Stine.
Seriously?
Roxie told her dad she saw him fighting with the girl. Now you're saying she told him she didn't see him at all. Come on.
We skip ahead some time. Terry comes over to ask Roxie on a romantic moonlight walk. They talk as they walk down the beach. She's surprised when he admits that he knew the dead girl. Her name is Maddy and they met at summer camp. He implies that they might have been romantically involved back then. The chapter goes on and on but nothing happens until Lee rocks up at the end of it. Roxie is surprised to see him and even more surprised when she discovers that Terry is no longer beside her.
How did she not notice he wasn't with her? I get it if you're in a crowded place and you lose track of your companion but the beach is empty. I get it if you're in a store and you turn an aisle but your companion doesn't and suddenly they're gone. This is a beach, not a store. There's no way she wouldn't have noticed him veering off somewhere.
Whatever.
I thought about doing odds but there are only two male characters in the story – Terry and Lee – so it pretty much has to be one of them. They're making Lee pretty obvious but some shade has been thrown at Terry now so I guess it's just 50/50. Boring odds for a boring book.
You know what would be better? Let's say Lee broke up with Shawna because he fell in love with Maddy. Shawna wants revenge and she wants Maddy out of the way, so she kills Maddy and frames Lee for it. That would be cool.
That's absolutely NOT what's going to happen.
Lee pulls the “I saw you” gag again, this time amending that he saw her on the beach. Duh. Roxie is internally panicking but then Terry shows back up carrying a fucking turtle. Out of nowhere.
There's this Little Bear book where you're reading along and suddenly you turn a page and it says “And then the skunks got married” completely out of the blue. It's so random that it yanks you right out of the story and you're confused and disoriented. That's what this turtle felt like.
Roxie decides to keep the turtle as a pet for no fucking reason at all. I have this terrible feeling that Mr Turtle is about to become a plot device.
Sigh.
Later Roxie calls Shawna again. Shawn reiterates that Lee has a bad temper and, girl, we've heard that already. Roxie whines that she saw him commit murder (which, no, you most certainly did not) but no one believes her. Shawna points out that it's hard to believe Roxie when Lee has an alibi.
Someone knocks on the door. Despite the fact that it's late at night and her parents are already in bed, Roxie just traipses down to answer it. Alone. After a girl has been viciously murdered. When she fears she might be next.
Protagonist seriously needs to listen to a true crime podcast or two? Check.
Lee's there and he bursts through the door and grabs her.
{{{GASP}}}
LOLZ
This is getting old, Stine.
He's just returning the sweater that Roxie somehow dropped on the beach and didn't know she lost.
Lee invites her to go for a ride in his boat the next day. She declines because it seems like a good way to get murdered. Finally some common sense. You go, Roxie!
The next day a boy named Eric, who has never existed before this moment and will never exist again, stops Roxie before her summer school class to ask if she really saw Maddy's murder. It's a rumor going around and I'm sure the bad guy has heard it by now. Roxie goes straight to the office and “shrilly” demands to talk to Ursula. Point Horror authors in the 80's and 90's really loved the words “shrill” and “shriek”. Anyway, Roxie yells at Ursula for telling people she witnessed a murder. Ursula says she only told two people but I don't think that makes the situation better.
Here's where the 📢TRIGGER WARNING comes into play.
They go to Roxie's house later in the afternoon to find the poor turtle murdered on the porch. There's a mallet beside it with a note attached saying: “This will be you if you keep talking.”
Seriously, Stine? There was no reason for this at all. It's not like Roxie had a deep emotional attachment to this turtle that you wanted to exploit because she'd only had it for a day. You could have accomplished the same sinister feel by having a broken doll laying there or a decapitated teddy bear. You didn't have to do this and I find it disgusting that you did.
Later Terry, Roxie, Ursula, Shawna and some random guys from school go skating. There's a lot of paragraphs of them going round and round in circles with varying degrees of success until Ursula has a back spasm, falls and hurts her ankle. Terry offers to drive her home and Shawna goes with them. Roxie – Ursula's best and dearest friend – stays at the rink.
Roxie skates around for awhile and then walks home. Alone. In the dark. When she thinks a murderer is after her.
Make it make sense, Stine. I'm begging you.
Lee appears and scares her again by pulling that whole “I saw you” shtick that got old after the first time. He offers to walk her home and she declines. He asks why she's suddenly afraid of him. She says she's just stressed by everything going on. He offers her another boat ride to relax her. As they're walking along she realizes they just passed his house and mentions it. He's confused and says that it's not his house.
Roxie realizes she went to the wrong house that night and asks Lee who lives there. He says it's a guy named Ray who just happens to be Terry's best friend. Now Roxie suspects Terry.
Roxie goes back to her house and Terry is waiting there for her. He tries to kiss her but she ducks him and goes inside. He stands outside and stares at her house for an uncomfortably long time.
The next day Roxie fills Ursula in on everything. Ursula urges her to go to the police but Roxie just says she'll break up with Terry instead. Because that will fix everything. I don't know whether she actually breaks up with him or not, but she accepts a movie date with Lee that night. They have a good time and she gets a goodnight kiss from him.
When she gets back up to her room, she gets a call from Terry who says “I saw you, Roxie. You shouldn't have been there.” She hangs up and considers it a threat but he's probably just talking about seeing her at the movies with Lee.
The next day, Roxie meets Lee at the docks for a boat ride. There's something wrong with the motor and Lee's trying to fix it, but he drops his screwdriver in the water. Roxie says her father makes her carry a tool kit so they head to her car to get it out of the glove box. As she's pulling it out, the packet of pictures that she had developed earlier in the book falls out and the pictures scatter. Lee asks her why she has pictures of his bedroom.
Dude.
Roxie realizes she was in Lee's house that night after all. He's pretty disgusted with himself for messing up. He holds Roxie at screwdriver-point (that's the first time I've ever typed that) and demands that she walk back to the dock with him. She does. Along the way he pouts that no one will let him have a fresh start. First Maddy tried to ruin it and now Roxie. Boo hoo.
Terry runs up. He and Lee struggle and Lee stabs him in the throat with the screwdriver. Lee forces Roxie into the boat and starts to drive out across the water.
Wait.
The boat wasn't running, Stine. Remember? That's why they needed the screwdriver. He wasn't just pretending it was broken because he didn't even know about the pictures yet and his entire goal was to get Roxie out into open water. So how is he driving an inoperable boat?
Roxie dives overboard before he can take her out too far which just shows poor planning on Lee's part. She should have been restrained or something. Lee tries to run her over with the boat a few times but she manages to evade him without drowning. The police just show up for some reason and Lee peacefully returns to the dock so they can arrest him.
Why? Why wouldn't he make a run for it? He's in a boat for fuck's sake and they are on land. They can't exactly catch him at the moment. Why wouldn't he just take off and hide for awhile?
Whatever.
Roxie is rescued and Terry is taken away in an ambulance and the book just fucking ends there. Stine is pretty infamous for his abrupt wrap-ups but this one was above and beyond.
So that's it I guess. The murder felt low stakes because we didn't know the victim. There was no real tension because nothing Lee did to terrorize Roxie was all that scary (turtle murder notwithstanding). I don't know. I felt like this one was low effort on Stine's part and that's saying something considering his usual offerings.
Sigh.
I guess I can't keep putting off Sweet Valley now that this is done.
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