The quick cut: A girl who gets promoted at her theme park job finds her life upended when someone dies on the ride she's operating.

A real review:
Thank you to Sourcebooks Fire for providing the arc for an honest review.

Theme parks are a fun way to spend a free day, but what happens behind the scenes can make that difficult to enjoy. The moving parts, the complications, and usual management dynamics. How would you react if it ended in the death of a co-worker?

Billie is excited for her summer. She gets to spend it with her best friend, a crush going in the right direction, and her promotion at work to ride operator. Unfortunately, the upbeat feeling ends quick when her first night on the job ends with a co-worker dead. What starts as a heart attack quickly looks like something more, specifically that is being blamed on her. What really happened? Is something bigger going on?

I really wanted to enjoy this book, especially since the theme park setting seemed perfect for a thriller. Unfortunately, it goes wrong in part due to another book doing a FAR better job at this. Plus, the characters never really get fully fleshed out, making it hard to truly care about them. That's necessary to feel connected to the storyline.

Billie is excited for an amazing summer and quickly loses so much of what she cares about. It's hard not to sympathize with her. That being said, she also clearly doesn't know the people in her life as well as she thinks she does.

Truthfully, the book FantasticLand does this story better. I hate saying it because I loved the setup here, but it just doesn't come together very efficiently. More character depth and development was needed to truly pull it all into an unforgettable story.

My rating: 3 out of 5

I am so into amusement parks and murder history, so naturally I was going to pick this gem up.
I sadly did not feel it though. Likely this is because I am old. I am too old to feel the proper teen angst and fear. I know that prosecutors are going to need a lot more to prosecute a teen ride attendant for murder and I know about cameras in the parks.
As you get older stuff stuff being so exciting. Sad for me.
Otherwise this is a decent read. I think my kids might like it.

I was expecting to love this. I love a thriller set in an amusement park, what a fun trope. I found this to be just an okay read, though. I thought that the plot could be confounding at times and paired with characters that I just never really cared about or felt invested in, this just didn't really work for me. I think that this would work for a true MG/YA reader, someone on the younger side. Since I've read my fair share of mystery/thrillers, this just didn't stand out from the crowd in any way for me.

I went into this book with high hopes to enjoy this thriller read. I was excited with how it took place at an amusement park, seeing how much I love amusement parks. I found myself confused various times during reading that I’d have to go back and re-read. It started to happen often that I had to DNF it. I wish I could enjoyed it more but it unfortunately wasn’t for me. Thank you Sourcebooks Fire and NetGalley for the ARC. All opinions are my own.

Being a theme park and roller coaster lover, could not wait to dive into this book! It was good but it wasn’t anything special.

Murder Land by Carlyn Greenwald is a YA suspense/thriller that takes place over the span of one deadly opening night for a theme park.

Billie has finally been promoted in her job at Californialand, a theme park that is centered around different events and times in the states history. In her new job at Murder Land ( a part of the theme park that is all about true crime events in California) she gets to operate a new rollercoaster that is one of the most anticipated in the park. Opening night is always chaotic and stressful but even more so when the ride that Billie is operating breaks down. When some of Billie's friends show up to test the ride out, they are able to get the coaster back in action. Deciding to treat her friends to an unauthorized ride, Billie starts to load everyone up when one of the janitors of the park shows up and wants to go on as well. Reluctantly Billie agrees and soon they are all enjoying the coaster. But what was supposed to be a sneaky but fun ride turns into a nightmare when the ride stops and someone is dead... And when clues left behind point to murder...Billie is the main suspect.

I wanted to love this book but something just didn't click for me. Parts of the plot were difficult to follow and I couldn't really get invested in the characters I do think that this would be a great book for someone who is just starting out reading the thriller/ suspense genre though, I just wasn't the right audience.

Thank you to NetGalley, Carlyn Greenwald, and Sourcebooks Fire for this ARC!! Publication date is May 6th 2025.

Thank you to Netgalley and the publisher for allowing me to read this arc. I love a good Ya thriller and this did not disappoint. What a race to find the truth for Billie and her friends! Fast paced, easy read, love the amusement park setting.

Since Amazon has this age range listed as 14-18, these are the trigger warnings I think should be listed. I also feel like a more accurate age range would be 16+

Trigger warnings: explicit language, mention of sexual activity (not depicted on page), divorced parents, poison/allergic reaction, shooting, stabbing

Overall I would give this book more 2.5-2.75 stars but I'm being generous and rounding up purely because I didn't figure out who the killer was......but with that being said, I don't really feel like there was enough information to deduce who the killer was.

As a teen/YA murder mystery/thriller it's a decent intro to the genre. Unfortunately for me that's where the pros of this book end. I was quickly shocked with how much queer characters are quite literally shoved in your face. 3/4 main characters are queer (and yes, it is mentioned multiple times) and one of their sets of parents are queer. I have no problem with queer/gay characters in books but you don't have to mention it throughout the book for us to remember that 2/4 main female characters are dating.

The writing felt like it was kind of all over the place. There were multiple sections I had to read more than once to figure out what was being said. One section I just gave up trying to understand because it didn't really make sense for the scene or what had occurred so far in the book. I was actually quite intrigued by the synopsis/plot of the book but was disappointed that it fell flat. Great idea, poor execution (although I suppose teens may not point out as many of the scenes that jump around).

Let's talk about the characters........UGH! Honestly by 22% of the book I had to just put it down. I was over it. I was over them. I hated all of them and by 40% I was hoping they all died so the book would end quicker. I wasn't rooting for any of them. I mean at 17/18ish with plans for college in the next 6-12 months you shouldn't be running around a crime scene in the theme park at night AFTER YOU'VE BEEN TOLD TO GO HOME! Like I'm sorry, but no. Half of the decisions that were made were mistakes. and honestly, I feel like if they had done what they were originally told, perhaps one of the characters would still be alive.

This book took me soooooooo long to read (5 1/2 hours over 2 weeks because I just couldn't get into the writing or the characters). I know that not every book is for everyone, and sadly this one was not for me. However, one of my book club members does have this book on her TBR and is excited for it. So I am eagerly waiting for her to get to read it after it releases to see if she feels the same way I do!

Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher/author for the chance to read this book early.

I unfortunately dnf’d this book about 30% of the way through. This sounded up my alley but it just did not hold my attention. I didn’t care about Grace and Sawyer’s relationship drama. I tried to force myself to like this book and pushed myself to keep going when I was 20% of the way in but by the time I got to 30% I couldn’t push through anymore. This book just was not for me.

Sourcebooks fire never fails me. This book was a great mystery thriller. It kept me intrigued the whole time. Several times I thought I had it figured out but the twists kept coming. I really enjoyed this book!!

LGBTQ Theme park slaughter night. I had such high hopes for this one. It took too long to get going and didn't hold my attention. Normally these super quick everyone dies tonight books are my weakness but this one missed me and I'm so sad about it.

This was such an intense and exciting read overall, the setting was really creepy and atmospheric which kept me absolutely captivated.

A whirl-wind roller coaster ride. The pacing is fast, the story is engaging and the world-building is fun. I found myself glued to the page and unable to put this down. The mystery of who is behind the deaths kept me guessing. I enjoyed the characters, especially Billie and felt I could relate to them with what they were going through trying to stay alive plus solve the murders. The theme park world reminded me a little of Disney as it's split into four different worlds.

Thank you to NetGalley, Sourcebooks, and Carlyn Greenwald for the ARC in exchange for an honest review.

Murder Land was a great thriller debut from Carlyn Greenwald.
Synopsis: Billie works at an amusement park, and it is the early premier night of the park's new attraction Murder Land. Billie is excited to begin her new position running one of the new coaster rides. Things quickly go awry when the ride breaks down. After the ride eventually gets fixed, Billie lets her friends on an unauthorized test run, and also the creepy old janitor that just showed up and asked to go on the ride too. Things get even worse when Billie discovers that the janitor died on the ride. Billie knows that the park will throw her under the bus for this PR nightmare, and she is willing to do anything to prove her innocence so she can keep her job.
I don't tend to gravitate towards thrillers, but every time I pick one up I am reminded that I love them, and this was no different. I thought the balance between twist I picked up on, and twists I didn't was great. I loved the characters and their relationships with each other. I enjoyed the snippets at the end of each chapter from the video transcript. It was fun to piece together what it was all about and how it tied into the story. The suspense made it so I didn't want to put this book down!

I really wanted to love this. It had all the right pieces to be a super fun, teenage, YA, murder-y romp. But, it just wasn't. I ended up DNF-ing this ARC at roughly 25%. I had a really hard time connecting to any of the characters in any meaningful way, AND I found the idea of a theme park about infamous California murders to be so ghastly that it pulled me out of the story completely. I'm a true crime girl and listen to true crime podcasts, watch true crime documentaries, etc., but a THEME PARK - even a fictional one - was just a step too far.

I was so excited to read this book! Billie starts her job at this theme park she has loved all her life. When her ride breaks down, she and some friends take the rollercoaster on a different track; and someone dies. But his death doesn't appear to match up with what everyone is saying. Billie and her friends set out to uncover the secrets of this park and to find out the killer. Had a creep Five Nights at Freddie feel to it. Good YA book!

This was a pretty good YA thriller, it’s perfect to read for the summer! My only struggle with this book is it is a little slow placed. It was hard to get into because of this for me!

This book had the potential to be really fun and just missed the mark for me. It was a little predictable and kind of boring. I think YA is the perfect category for it because I think teens will eat it up, but as a 37 year old woman, it wasn't there for me.

This is what I would call a pretty solid YA thriller novel for the target audience, especially if they are just starting out with thrillers and mysteries. I thought that the concept was solid, I liked the setting of a theme park, I liked the idea of corporate greed and conspiracy, and I liked the one night setting. All that said, as a thriller reader who has been around the block a few times in my 40 years of being alive, it was pretty middle of the road in terms of how it all played out, with fairly flat characters and some not terribly surprising reveals. I can see this being a great choice for others, but for me it was pretty flat.

While I’m too chicken to go on roller coaster rides myself, I’m a sucker for a good thriller set in an amusement park! 🙌

There definitely were some twists with this one, though they were a bit predictable. Overall, it was a good read but I was expecting more of a slasher. Still recommend checking it out though! 👏

Thank you to NetGalley and Sourcebooks Fire for the opportunity to read the eARC in exchange for my honest review! ❤️