The fact that I sprung for a hardcover copy of Amy Engel’s (The Roanoke Girls, The Familiar Dark) latest novel I Did It For You should tell you that I am a fan. I am so sad that it wasn’t as good as her previous novels – which I LOVED.

Fourteen years after Eliza and her boyfriend Travis were shot in a local park, Eliza’s younger sister Greer comes home to Ludlow, Kansas. Bad things happen in Kansas, apparently. (It’s the place where the Clutter family - made famous in Truman Capote’s iconic book In Cold Blood – were killed in 1959.)

Greer has a love-hate relationship with Ludlow. On the one hand, her childhood besties Ryan and Cassie are there (Ryan has recently returned home following his divorce; Cassie had never left). On the other hand, she has a strained relationship with her parents. Her father is an alcoholic and her mother buried her grief in relentless cleaning. Why come home now, when she has made a life for herself in Chicago? Well, that’s because two more kids are dead. Greer is convinced that these deaths are connected to her sister’s murder even though the person responsible for Eliza and Travis’s deaths, Roy Mathews, was caught and executed.

In an effort to uncover the truth, Greer teams up with an unlikely person: Dean Mathews, Roy’s older brother. Together, they try to figure out Roy’s motive for killing Eliza and Travis because while Roy admitted to killing them, he also said he didn’t really know them and so the crime doesn’t make sense to either Greer or Dean.

Maybe if I hadn’t read The Roanoke Girls or The Familiar Dark first, I would have liked I Did It For You more than I did. I read a lot of thrillers, and this one stacks up just fine against many of them. But I was really hoping for the sucker punch The Familiar Dark offered or the dark family secret hidden in the depths of The Roanoke Girls. For me, this just didn’t have the same emotional depth as those two books. That said, the last third of the book definitely outpaced the first two thirds and while I suspected one thing, I was surprised by another revelation. So, not a total miss – really not a miss at all, just not as good as I’d hoped.