Ugh, I wanted to like this so badly. I love a no-exit situation and the prospect of that on a ship sounded epic. I almost DNF'ed this about halfway through because it was taking an absolute age to get through. The chapters are on the shorter side and I felt like the chapters were never-ending. It just wasn't holding my attention at all. I also felt like there were way too many characters and not enough meat to any of them. I would have been perfectly fine with the main two characters going about their business, everything else felt so excessive. It also felt like there was no 'mystery' solving really happening and Jade was just spinning around in circles. Two stars for the last 10% of the book because I actually really enjoyed that - I wish that pace was the way the entire book went.

I normally really enjoy Diana Urban, but this one just didn't work for me. I know this is YA, I like YA - except these college age kids had the maturity level and depth of middle school students who shouldn't be allowed to play with the big kids. I put this down at 22% because it just wasn't working for me.

thank you to the publisher and NetGalley for an e arc in exchange for an honest review

With this book, I have read all of Diana Urban’s current work. I really liked All Your Twisted Secrets. I really disliked These Deadly Games. Lying in the Deep falls somewhere in the middle.

The premise was really interesting (Suite Life on Deck with murder!!) and overall it was a really fun read.

This book synopsis was really interesting and that's what got me interested in this book. However, the characters weren't my favorite. The characters in this book got me stressing and the characters are immature and that annoyed me. The overall plot is unrealistic and I am okay with unrealistic plot line and the pacing overall was alright. Not too fast and not too slow. This book is a book that can be read in one sitting and that's what I did hahaha. The writing style was great but the plot twist were mostly predictable.

Thank you Netgalley, Penguin YA, and Diana for the e-ARC in exchange for an honest review!

Jade’s next semester in college should be her best yet. Four months studying on a cruise, sailing all over Europe. It should have been the best time of her life. That is until her best friend gets with her boyfriend and they both drop her. Now the semester away is looking like more of an escape than anything else. But when Lainey and Silas board the cruise with her, it seems the next four months may end up being worse than she thought. Their distaste of one another is instantly noticeable and at first it’s fine, but then Lainey ends up dead, and everyone thinks Jade did it.

Lol. I’m sorry. Just lol. Not even a fun lol. More of a disappointed but not surprised lol.

I read Urban’s debut, All Your Twisted Secrets, and found it painfully mediocre, with the plot twist at the end annoying me more than shocking me. But to be fair to Urban, I do heavily dislike books that tells the story in a dual timeline and that is exactly what that book did, so I can’t blame my dislike for that book entirely on her.
I hate myself for not loving this. I really do. I’m in the street team on Discord and so I feel even more crud that I disliked this. It feels like I’m personally betraying the author when she’s been nothing but nice to me.

But this just… didn’t hit the mark. I can’t tell if it’s because I’ve read too many mystery books—especially recently, I’ve been rereading my favourite mystery books lately—that I’m just no longer shocked by most plot twists because I can guess them and almost always get it correct, or if it just really didn’t work because of how utterly predictable everything was.

I’m going to talk about the things I liked. I liked the prose, it was nice and easy, engaging when it needed to be and entertaining. I liked Jade’s budding relationships with the side characters, especially Divya and Navya. I liked how Jade, as a character, felt full and well rounded, and that her personality was obvious right from the beginning.

Now, onto the negatives.

I’m going to try not to spoil, so what I’ll say is last night when I was reading, I wrote down some notes in a private Discord server I use whenever I want to comment on a book but don’t want to do so publicly on Twitter, and I practically hit the nail on the head with my predictions.

The biggest plot twist was obvious from the very beginning. I’m the type of person who doesn’t mind when I get something right when I’m reading a mystery—to be honest, it makes me feel smart—but this time, it just felt like I was too right too early. Sure, it was honestly just a hunch I threw out there because of something I remembered about another book, but when it actually happened, I was a little bit gobsmacked. It was more of a ‘you seriously went that route’ than ‘yay, I figured it out’. And then I guessed something else about one of the important characters and I was honestly just annoyed at this point. And then I guessed another detail, this time more of a minor one that I don’t think I’d have guessed had I not watched Pretty Little Liars, and I was done. Guessing stuff is fine, I like it, but it kind of annoyed me that I literally guessed all of the major parts of this book.

And then what came after all of this, regarding another character just felt kind of… stupid? I mean, I don’t know about you but if someone accused me of murder I wouldn’t freak out and then… murder that person. That just feels kind of hypocritical, you know?

It just all felt so off to me. So anti-climactic and yet engaging enough that I wanted to know what happened.
Also, another gripe I’ve just remembered. This book was slow to begin with. So slow I was constantly checking the page count waiting for the moment Lainey dies. It’s a murder mystery and yet the murder literally does not occur until halfway through. I get the backstory was necessary, where people would start to point their fingers at Jade, but some parts felt unnecessarily long and then the mystery part wrapped up so quickly I was questioning what the point of it all was.

(Do not get me started on that ending. I don’t want to talk about it.)

I’m beginning to think Urban’s books aren’t for me. Maybe I’m just too used to this kind of mystery and therefore it fell flat, or maybe this really was just so goddamn predictable. I don’t know. It is a good mystery, regardless of my feelings on it, so I feel like others could definitely read it and not find it so utterly baffling like I did. Take my opinions with a grain of salt.

One more thing before I go, though, this is supposed to be a Young Adult book and yet they’re more than halfway through college? Wouldn’t that make them almost twenty-one? Jade definitely didn’t feel like a twenty-year-old to me, but I’m not twenty yet (six months to go, people) so maybe that’s just why.

Thank you, NetGalley, for an e-arc in exchange for an honest review.

This was definitely not a thriller, or how I imagine a YA Thriller to be. This was romantic suspense at best.

The story is about a "traveling school." A prestigious school, that is on board a cruise ship. They travel around the world, but also provides classes, etc on board and off. A cool concept for a school, if I say so. But, it all starts with teenage drama. A best friend, who stole a boyfriend, comes on the ship with the said boyfriend. Yup... The book did start with a bloody scene, so we know there will be murder, but why or who we don't get to find out till later in the second half of the book, when bodies start to pile up. The first half of the book is just teenage drama, and trying to figure out how it all started, and trying to make the ex boyfriend jealous.

Like I said, romantic suspense. It was definitely not for me. It was completely out there with the plot. But it could be entertaining for certain demographic.

Thank you to the publisher, all thoughts are my own.

A murder mystery set on a cruise ship following college kids? Sign me up. In this story we follow Jade who is so ready for a semester aboard the cruise ship following the break up of not only her boyfriend but also her best friend. However, when she sets sail, she finds out that the new couple is on board with her. Her obsession with trying to find out what happened between the three of them as well as with the couple grows. When one ends up murdered, she will have to clear her name.

I wanted to love this book so bad. The premise was so interesting. However, for the characters to be in college, they read VERY young. The main character was annoying and did not make the best decisions as someone who is in an Ivy League School! The character development was lacking and the twists were just meh. I would recommend this to middle age readers, not young adult.

I had this one partially figured out. But there was still something that was different than what played out in my head. It made this a hard book to put down.

I enjoyed how the murders took place on a ship. There was no way out and it definitely made it more suspenseful. The characters were older than I expected, but I like that for this. Jade was super easy to like besides her somewhat obsession with Silas and Lainey. I adored Felix and Miguel right away. This was just a super fun thriller that made me second guess myself multiple times.

I gave this book 4 1/2 stars rounded up to 5 on Goodreads.

Thank you to the publisher for approving my earc on Netgalley.

Thanks so much for this review copy. I really did love this book. It was full of fun twists and turns. Also I do Diana Urban last couple books, All Your Twisted Secerts and These Deadly Games. I'm so looking forward to more book by this aurthor. Thank so much for letting me reading it. I do love discovering new read.

Thank you NetGalley for the ARC!

I have to admit that I LOVE a murder mystery set on a boat in the middle of the ocean. At their core, these stories are about forced proximity to an unknow murderer, I find that super riveting and spooky!

Lying in the Deep finds the FMC, Jade, in this exact situation. This book was fast paced and kept me intrigued from start to finish. At times, I found the writing to be a bit juvenile but these characters are high school students so that tracks.

There were ALOT of characters to keep up with and alot of them had very small parts in the overall storyline. One these characters were introduced and their role was uncovered, they were quickly forgotten.

Overall, a quick entertaining read! I will be on the lookout for future books from Diana Urban.

Unique YA (ish--college students but they act like high school students) mystery adventure set on a cruise ship semester at sea.

This could have been good. The premise absolutely drew me in--a YA retelling of Death on the Nile--and while I did appreciate the nods to that classic novel, this ultimately didn't work for me.

The main premise is that a group of high achieving college students are heading off on a cruise ship for Campus on Board, a semester traveling to various countries and attending classes on the ship. Jade is a Stanford student looking forward to the new adventure and a bit of distance after being dumped and blocked by her boyfriend Silas, who has now hooked up with her former roommate and best friend Lainey. Yet while in the check in line Jade discovers that Lainey and Silas are also on board. When suspicious things begin to occur, all eyes are on the jilted Jade. How can she prove that she is innocent?

For this being about college students, these characters, particularly Jade, are the most immature, whiny people around. Jade spends SO much time obsessing about Silas and Lainey and side-eyeing them across the room that it just got nauseating after a while. These characters all act stupidly and the armchair detective work is HIGH. Seriously, if anyone would have had the common sense or maturity to sit down and have a conversation instead of spying around corners, the melodrama would have been so much more palatable.

Another thing that annoyed me was that there was one point that some characters do meth of all things, and it comes out that one of them had been doing it for a while. This is so incredibly unrealistic. Adderall, I would believe, but meth? I have two kids who just finished college and I asked them if they ever had heard of college students using meth. They listed alcohol, pot, ecstasy, Adderall, Oxy, even cocaine, but meth never entered either of their spheres of reference.

This book may work for some readers who can ignore the utter immaturity of these supposed college students and appreciate the locked room (cruise ship) mystery. I just couldn't.

the problem with this book was the beginning. It dragged on and made it very hard to stay focused while waiting for something to happen. Honestly, that is the only reason why I took two stars away. Once the book hit a little bit above the 50% mark, the story got so intriguing and I couldn't out the book down.

You can tell that Urban really thought through this mystery, making every revelation a shocker. In fact, I truly had no idea who was behind all of the killings on board the cruise ship. There were so many red herrings which made the book fun to read once it got to the part of solving the mystery.

I do have to say that the ending was a little b it dramatic, but hey, it's fiction. The characters were all somewhat likable and understandable, but a few were dealing with problems way over their heads for college students. Jade was a good main character and I enjoyed her romance with Felix,

Overall, the cruise ship was an interesting setting for a murder mystery and Urban did amazing at describing where the characters were and what was happening. It felt like I was really on that boat watching this story unfold. Thank you so much to NetGalley and Penguin Group for this review copy!

When I read the synopsis for this one I was immediately intrigued. I didn’t really enjoy the authors first book as the twist at the end was one I didn’t like so I was a bit nervous coming back to her books but I decided that a murder mystery set at sea was something I had to pick up! I heard this one was similar to death on the Nile and I can definitely see some similarities, stuck on a ship at sea with a killer, and a race against time to find them. As opposed to the authors first book the twists in this one were better executed and I found myself with a notebook in hand trying to solve the mystery along with our main character, Jade. I think if you like mystery’s, especially locked room type ones or trapped with the killer I highly recommend this one!

I really enjoyed this one! I was a little hesitant at first since the authors debut novel wasn’t one of my favourites and her other books didn’t really interest me but I picked this one up because I love books set on ships and this one did not disappoint. The beginning was a bit slow but once you passed that the action picked up. I enjoyed Jade well enough as a main character and I really enjoyed the trap at sea with a killer aspect. There were a lot of twists and turns in this one, some I saw coming and others I didn’t. Overall I really enjoyed this one.

what started as a young adult version of DEATH ON THE NILE turned into the worst characters I’ve ever come into contact with 🥴😵‍💫

every single college student on this cruise (that also teaches classes like what how can I sign up???) is an idiot - like if someone got unalived on my semester long cruise, I’d lock myself in my room and get the heck off that ship

BUT NO our MCs have to solve the mystery before the police do!!!! why? it’s still unclear to me

diana urban is a queen for fast-paced heart-pounding locked door mysteries, and I must admit, I was pretty hooked even though I was rolling my eyes and cringing at these characters and their dialogue more often than not

I just found the entire story a little unbelievable and random for my taste, but for those who love young adult mysteries, definitely give it a go!

thank you to netgalley and razorbill for the advanced copy in exchange for an honest review!

rating: 2 stars
wine pairing: south african pinotage

This one is just pure fun.

It's a little silly and a whole lot of over-the-top crazy, but I loved our main character and absolutely adored the setting - I would have loved to do a semester at sea (maybe without murder, thought).

There's a ton of teen angst and the reasons behind everything definitely stretch the imagination - turn your logic sensors off. But the book was a blast of a read.

Would read the author again!

Lying in the deep

This was one wild ride, a 5 star worthy ride. I had so many different ideas of what was going on that I had to write them down to keep track. I am somewhat proud that I figured out parts of it. There are so many plot twists and additions that are there just to throw you off.

I received an advance review copy of this book, and this review represents my honest opinion. Thank you to netgalley, Diana Urban, and the publisher for the opportunity to read the book.

The characters are brilliant, I really enjoyed how they all interacted. I think it was a good idea to have them be college-aged given some of the things that happen. There are hard drugs involved in one storyline, and it wasn't until that point that i realised how vital that age choice was. This is one of those books where if you didn't catch the hints while reading, you will when you're looking back. It was nice to have a little hint of romance even if it seemed to progress quite quickly.

If I had a complaint, it would be the main character is not the sharpest tool in the shed. If you're the main suspect in a crime, don't start breaking into crime scenes and having chats with other suspects. (On that point, they really should have had guards or something) Also, I knew very quickly what she'd done to upset her friend enough that she stole her boyfriend (not that I condone that). Plus, she very much was kind of stalking her cheating ex, and that's not a good look.

I already own one of the authors' other books, and i'm excited to read that one now.

This is definitely one of those murder mysteries where EVERYONE has a motive to keep you guessing! I also really enjoyed the fact that the story was set at a semester at sea (and yay for college-aged characters in YA books!!!!).

I've read a number of books in this genre, but this is the first to take place at a school on a luxury cruise ship (which is something I've never even heard of). I found it to be a fast-paced and engaging suspense. There are numerous twists to keep the reader guessing during this floating mystery.

At times, Jade was a bit annoying in her obsession with her ex-boyfriend Silas and ex-friend Lainey. Jade's relationship with Felix with okay, but it did feel a little forced. In some scenes, the characters felt like they were in high school vs. college, but this did balance out overall.

It was fun to try and figure out who the killer was, and I was pleasantly surprised by the ending. I wish a bit more of the action had taken place off the ship so I could've enjoyed the ports a bit more, but I really enjoyed this one. I look forward to reading more by Urban in the future.

Are you ready Dive into the deep end of this chilling tale with a shocking twist?

College at Sea - Jade is spending a semester of college at sea, called Campus on Board, that she has been dreaming of through most of college.
Ex-Bestie - But when she arrives she finds her ex-bestie and her ex-boyfriend there, and they happen to be dating each other.
Found Dead - Jade is still reeling from the abrupt breakup and is even more taken aback when her ex-bestie is found missing with blood all over her cabin.
Body Count - the Body count continues to rise as someone is trying desperately to cover their tracks and potentially frame Jade.

While I had never read anything by this author before, I will absolutely be picking up more. The pacing was fast and I loved the chapters filled with life on the boat as well as some fun excursions in Europe. The twists will keep you guessing for sure. This book would be perfect for a vacation read. Grab a life vest and join the suspenseful journey