Audiobook Review: Killing Sadie by Rachel Peterson

We have been shouting about Rachel Peterson since before Killing Sadie was out in the world. I attended her launch event at Bookloft and we hosted an interview here on the blog, and by the time this review is live she has already become one of our favorite debut authors of the year! She is an Ohio writer and this is an Ohio story and we are contractually obligated to be entertained by both of those things (well, at least try haha I made an agreement with my wife that I would say something nice about Ohio every day so consider today checked off!). But honestly the book would have gotten us regardless. Check out our review below and pick up Killing Sadie, out now!

Killing Sadie

by Rachel Peterson
Published by: Simon Pulse
on August 4, 2026
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Perfect for fans of How to Survive Your Murder and Dead Girls Can’t Tell Secrets, this young adult thriller unspools the truth behind a tragic murder through multiple unreliable narrators who all have secrets to keep.
Here’s what we do know: there was another infamous barn party at the McClain family farm last night, and things went horribly wrong. By the end of the night, there were two dead bodies in the old barn: seventeen-year-old Sadie Cooper and her killer, Mason Vreeland. The murder was heartbreakingly witnessed by Sadie’s twin sister, Jayne, and Sadie died in her arms. Mason was killed by Sadie’s boyfriend, Ben, in an attempt to save Sadie.
Aside from figuring out Mason’s motive, it should be an open and shut case.
But it’s not.
The story unfolds just after the murders, and Jayne, Ben, and Sadie’s best friend, Liz, are telling the cops what transpired at the party and the events leading up to it. But little details don’t match. And those little details start to add up to big discrepancies. But who’s lying, and why?
The shocking truth is revealed in the third act, when the POV shifts to victim Sadie herself, in the days leading up to the party. Witness exactly what happened—and see if you can piece it all together. Because poor Sadie totally missed what was right in front of her.

Review

Killing Sadie opens the morning after a barn party gone wrong. Two teenagers are dead. Three survivors are sitting in separate interrogation rooms swearing they have told the police everything. Spoiler alert: they have not. The question is never who is lying, because everyone is lying from page one. The question is why, and what it costs them, and what it means for the girl at the (dead) center of all of it.

The format is everything here. Jayne, Liz, and Ben each narrate their own chapters and each of them is being interviewed by police, which means every revelation is filtered through what they are willing to admit and what they are not. The timestamps do not match. The details do not reconcile. The three matching broken-heart friendship necklaces that show up early become something else entirely by the end. Rachel trusts her readers to notice the gaps and that trust pays off.

Nobody in this book is particularly likable, and Rachel owns that completely. She told us at her launch event that she knew exactly how the book would end and worked backward from there, which explains why every messy decision these characters make feels inevitable rather than convenient. Ben in particular is the kind of guy who is perfectly pleasant right up until he is not, and watching that surface crack is one of the more unsettling pleasures the book offers.

And then there is Sadie. When the book finally shifts to her perspective in the days before the party, it is a genuine gut punch. Her voice is vain, funny, self-aware, and heartbreaking. She is dissecting her own flaws while moving toward something she cannot see coming. Rachel ran the risk of it feeling like a gimmick and instead it lands like a verdict. The Romeo and Juliet references threaded through her chapters are doing quiet, deliberate work that the rest of the book follows through on.

The audiobook is the move. Multiple narrators give every POV a distinct voice that matters when you are tracking who is lying about what.