Debut author Jodie Lynn Zdrok transports readers to 1887 Paris in this fascinating YA murder mystery that follows a 16-year-old newspaper reporter named Nathalie Baudin. Nathalie finds her new beat—reporting on the unclaimed bodies that show up at the public morgue—fascinating but also a bit grisly. As the story opens, we find her waiting her turn in an incredibly long line to enter a morgue. Morgue viewing was indeed a popular pastime in fin de siècle Paris—even for families with young children.
But soon one corpse claims Nathalie’s attention: a young woman, hardly more than a girl, who was viciously stabbed. As she looks at the girl, Nathalie suddenly finds herself transported to the scene of the murder and relives the girl’s final moments. Nathalie feels shaken to her core, “as if the horror she’d witnessed was both real and not real.” The incident marks the beginning of Nathalie’s quest to understand her strange new supernatural abilities and harness them to help find the serial killer who is terrorizing the city
Zdrok holds a degree in European history, and her writing sparkles with details that evoke 19th-century Paris. Spectacle’s cliffhanger ending will leave readers eager for Nathalie’s next case.
