I mostly enjoyed The School Trip, a new psych thriller by Miranda Smith. The plot is strong and has just enough to keep the “mystery” going through the entire story.
It’s interesting, however, that the title is more referring to the catalyst for the story rather than the action throughout. That’s not a complaint, just an observation.
The title event is the perfect foil for all kinds of things to go wrong. Anyone who has ever been on a school trip as a parent or chaperone knows the chaos that occurs. As a former elementary school teacher, I can confirm that the other fears teachers have are accurate in this book.
Emma is an interesting character. I get why she is written the way she is, and how that affects her perspective when her world goes sideways. But sometimes it didn’t exactly jibe with her attitude toward teaching.
It felt like that got preachy a few times. I mean, yes, teachers care about their kids and live in fear that something will happen to a student while under their watch. But there were times in the book when Emma got more preachy about how wonderful teachers are while seemingly ignoring her own situation.
Maybe it was her way of trying to cope? Not sure about that.
I suppose it was consistent with her “going it alone” after her husband’s death.
However, it feels like that twist came almost too late in the book. I was taken down another path. Then the revelations start to occur. This took me in a completely different direction. I guess that is where the psych in psych thriller comes from?
And once that revelation happens, everything seems to come together very quickly. Emma is on the case and figures everything out. Which leads me to why I said I “mostly enjoyed” the book.
I felt like the author had a low opinion of the police. They were portrayed as inept and unwilling to listen to an emotional mother. But instead of elaborating on why the police couldn’t, the author made Emma the super-detective, putting all the pieces together and going rogue.
Kind of unfair to blame the police for not putting things together when they didn’t have the same information that Emma did. Maybe that’s being personally nitpicky.
At any rate, The School Trip did have me turning pages to see how everything worked out. And I will certainly look for the next psych thriller from Miranda Smith.
