Not Quite Dead Yet

by Holly Jackson ★★★★☆

Not Quite Dead Yet opens in small-town Woodstock, Vermont at the local Halloween festival, where we're introduced to narrator and central character, Margaret "Jet" Mason. Jet is hoping to make a quick appearance and a speedy exit, but she finds herself bombarded by a steady stream of townspeople: Jet's parents, her brother and sister-in-law, her jilted ex-boyfriend, her childhood best friend, the new chief of police, and the town drunk, to name a few. It's overwhelming for Jet, and it's a bit overwhelming for the reader. as well But all of the people are introduced to establish the interconnected web of potential suspects for what happens next.

When Jet finally extracts herself from the festival and returns home, she's attacked in her house, bashed in the head multiple times by a blunt object and left for dead. Except she's not dead...at least not yet. She wakes up the next day to a room full of teary-eyed family members. She's alive, but the blunt force trauma dislodged a piece of bone from her skull, and it is resting in a very precarious spot. The doctor gives Jet the very bad news:

“I’m sorry, Jet, there’s no easy way to tell you this. With the fragment’s position, putting extra pressure on an already weak arterial wall, an aneurysm will form at the site. A large one. And when it ruptures, the resulting hemorrhage, the bleeding, it…it would be fatal....Given the particular circumstances of your case, I would say we have just days. Maybe a week until it ruptures.”

Jet has two choices: undergo emergency surgery, with less than a 10% chance of survival, or live out the next seven days in the most meaningful way possible. "Die now or die in seven days. Jet didn’t have hope, but she could have that week. 'I choose the seven days. I want that time. I need it.'” Her parents angrily protest her choice and certain death over the potential chance of survival in surgery, and they question what she could possibly need to do in that short time. "Something great. Something no one had ever done before. 'I’m going to solve my own murder,'” she tells them.

It's a little bit of a far-fetched premise, but it's grounded in just enough science that a reader won't have to suspend too much disbelief to enjoy the rest of the book. Jet embarks on her quest to find her killer. She's aided by Billy Finney, her childhood best friend, and they begin to unravel the threads that could have led someone to want to kill a harmless twenty-seven-year-old. Jet has a wry sense of humor about her fatalistic future, and she prefers making people uncomfortable by reminding them of her impending doom versus wallowing in her own sad fate.

It turns out that she and Billy are pretty decent detectives, too, and author Holly Jackson creates a mess of motives ranging from money to power to revenge, casting most characters as potential suspects and keeping them in that grey area of suspicion for nearly the entire novel. While it's primarily a whodunit, there's also a solid character arc for Jet. If a seven-day death sentence doesn't motivate you, I don't know what will, but it's still satisfying to see her shed her procrastinating tendencies while also evolving emotionally. As she reflects at one point, "Turns out dying feels a lot like living."

And it all works pretty well! It's well-plotted and executed, even if a few clues are more easily uncovered than they should have been. Jet's sarcastic aloofness about her impending demise and coldness towards her family can be a bit off-putting at times, but she's written with a strong and consistent voice, and it's all the more satisfying when bits of that hard outer shell begin to be chiseled away by her circumstances. The novel premise and a multi-layered mystery separate it from the more straightforward offerings in the genre, and it all melded together to make Not Quite Dead Yet a high-four-star read for me, Recommended.