Two Will Come 3 by Kyungok Kang: B+

Book description:
Jina is through sitting around in terror and accepts an invitation for a night out with her friends. En route, however, she has a vision that indicates one of them will be responsible in some way for her death. She begins to try to puzzle things out, working to figure out which one of her friends could have a motive for wanting her dead.

Review:
Last time, I talked about the continuity in this series as one of the things I like best. Well, another of those things is the ability to surprise the reader with shocking images without resorting to violence and gore to accomplish it. Kang does a good job of building a suspenseful atmosphere then bursting out with a panel of psychological creepiness. Any time someone tries to attack Jina, it’s out of the blue and surprising, and there’s also a very cool moment where she’s thinking about one of the murdered victims—sort of imagining the victim in her mind’s eye—and then suddenly that victim turns around and seems to start talking to her. It’s very nifty.

Also in this volume, the two parts of Jina’s life—school romantic drama and family curse drama—begin to come together and one can see what Kang has been planning all along. You see, it’s true that there will be one person who tries to kill the intended victim, but there will also be a second person, an “enabler.” Someone around Jina will incite someone else to kill her, in other words. And as the relationship drama escalates, two girls obsessed with Jaesuk and angry at Jina because he likes her begin to look like serious suspects. It’s quite well done. I had never really questioned the presence of the school drama, so I hadn’t expected it to all tie in together like this.

Too, the subplots are not forgotten, and it looks like all of them will be successfully resolved in the final volume. Just one more to go!

Review copy provided by the publisher.