Luceat Lux Vestra

Release Date: June 10th, 2014 from Greenwillow Books/HarperCollins

Summary from GoodReads:

"Meadow Woodson, a fifteen-year-old girl who has been trained by her father to fight, to kill, and to survive in any situation, lives with her family on a houseboat in Florida. The state is controlled by The Murder Complex, an organization that tracks the population with precision.

The plot starts to thicken when Meadow meets Zephyr James, who is—although he doesn’t know it—one of the MC’s programmed assassins. Is their meeting a coincidence? Destiny? Or part of a terrifying strategy? And will Zephyr keep Meadow from discovering the haunting truth about her family?"

When I first heard of the title of this book, I was instantly interested. The Murder Complex stayed true to it's name; there was murder. Blood. Gore. Grief. Everything that I love in a good book. As some may know, I am a big fan of anything involving murder mysteries or serial killers. Sadly, I did not absolutely love the work as a whole. 

Since this was the last book I read in 2014, I decided that I would give this book a higher rating because I wanted to end the year on a good note. For Lindsay's first time being published, this was actually written better than most debut books. But, unfortunately, there were too many things that I found disappointing than interesting.

Meadow was trained to survive. I get that. For me, I felt like Cummings was trying too hard to make her a badass female character. Whenever there would be a scene were Meadow was being a "badass", I felt like it was too overdone to be true. I understand that there is a big hype with making a strong, independent female role, and I'm actually one of those people who get excited when there is a female that isn't the stereotypical fragile character, but with The Murder Complex...the characters were just not believable. 

Also, there was instalove. One thing that I am thankful for with the love in this books is that there was not a love triangle. Thank you, Lindsay Cummings, because you are one of the few YA authors out there that avoided the dreaded love triangle. From what I read, Zephyr was constantly dreaming about Meadow and considered her the "Moonlit Girl". When he saw her for the very first time.... BAM! He know he was in love with a girl that resembled the girl in his dreams. As for Meadow, after being around him TWICE...the girl loved him. 

On another note, the ending was predictable. There were blatant hints in the book that suggested what would happen at the end. Meadow's curiosity was just an act for Cummings to slip hints throughout with the hopes that no one would notice. The cliffhanger didn't do any justice for me. I don't know, maybe I just really didn't like the book from the beginning and that's why it fell apart for me. 

I would still recommend this debut book though. I feel like Cummings just had a rough start as being a first-time author, and I get that. If more people read The Murder Complex and she receives more feedback, it can help her with later works in her life to perfect her writing overall. I wish Lindsay Cummings the best of luck in 2015 and her future career as an author.