ARC Review: THE BUTTERFLY CLUES

The Book: THE BUTTERFLY CLUES
The Author: Kate Ellison
The Publisher: Egmont USA
Expected Release Date: February 4, 2012

Marketing Copy Summary:
Penelope (Lo) Marin has always loved to collect beautiful things. Her dad's consulting job means she's grown up moving from one rundown city to the next, and she's learned to cope by collecting (sometimes even stealing) quirky trinkets and souvenirs in each new place--possessions that allow her to feel at least some semblance of home.


But in the year since her brother Oren's death, Lo's hoarding has blossomed into a full-blown, potentially dangerous obsession. She discovers a beautiful, antique butterfly pendant during a routine scour at a weekend flea market, and recognizes it as having been stolen from the home of a recently murdered girl known only as "Sapphire"--a girl just a few years older than Lo. As usual when Lo begins to obsess over something, she can't get the murder out of her mind.

As she attempts to piece together the mysterious "butterfly clues," with the unlikely help of a street artist named Flynt, Lo quickly finds herself caught up in a seedy, violent underworld much closer to home than she ever imagined--a world, she'll ultimately discover, that could hold the key to her brother's tragic death.

My Thoughts:
Ellison does not disappoint in this haunting portrayal of love, loss, obsession, and murder. 

Lo is not the typical MC.  She's a little crazy, with her obsessive need to tap-tap-tap-banana her way through life, her kleptomaniac tendencies, and the full-on hoarder she's become since her brother's death the previous year.  Her family, shattered from a tragedy caused by Oren's drug addiction, is this hollow, empty thing.  Her mother is bare there, her father losing himself in work.  Lo finds solace in beautiful things she's collected, most of which she's stolen.

On one such scavenging trip, Lo finds herself in an alley behind a yellow house that seems to be beckoning to her.  As she moves closer, gunshots erupt from inside, exploding out the back windows, bullets barely missing Lo.  She escapes only to read later about the stripper who'd been gunned down in her home.  Sapphire.  Lo feels this inexplicable pull toward the dead girl, and when she finds a beautiful pendant that belonged to Sapphire at the flea market, not only must she have it, but she absolutely has to know what really happened to Sapphire.

THE BUTTERFLY CLUES contains more than just the mystery of who Sapphire's killer is, but in searching out the murderer, Lo begins to uncover the truth about her brother's death and the secretive life he'd led up to his demise.  Full of twists and turns, you may figure out who killed Sapphire fairly early on (I know I did), but it's the journey that counts, and in the end, you will be left gasping at the real truth that Lo has needed since long before a stripper showed up dead.