Well, I know which book is going to end up being the most forgettable thing I've read this season. It hasn't even been three days and I'm already having to remind myself that this thing existed and that I read it. 
 Ten is a modern YA retelling of Agatha Christie's And Then There Were None, which is a concept I dig. I love whodunnits, especially the kind that involve mysterious invitations to private murder parties. Sordid histories, cutthroat paranoia, deadly revenge, how could this possibly go wrong? 
 By being stupid, that's how. By being frustratingly, predictably, implausibly stupid. 
 Here are the problems: 
 The characters are all stupid 
 So look, I get that when you're doing a re-telling, it's absolutely within the acceptability playbook to play it straight. I get that not every remake is going to be a deconstruction of the original, and that's fine, but as a reader, it becomes a problem for me when the story that you're re-telling is literary primordial ooze like And Then There Were None. This fucker is in the DNA of a million different mystery and horror narratives across all mediums, and it seems near-impossible to me that anyone would have made it to young adult-hood without being exposed to the tropes present in this story in some form or another. 
 So the decision to have these kids behave as though they've never even conceived of a situation similar to the one that they find themselves in completely boggles my mind. I mean, I don't expect everyone to be Randy or Abed, ok, but I do feel like it's reasonable for a certain level of general competency to be expected from the characters in order to keep the reader from wanting to throw the book against a fucking wall. 
 Which is why I don't think I'm being unfairly critical when I say that these characters are contrivedly fucking unreasonable. It takes a mysterious power outage, a cut internet cable, the conspicuous absence of their host, a threatening DVD, a nearly-deadly "accident", two suspicious deaths, one actual, indisputable murder, and a partridge in a fucking pear tree before they will even consider the possibility that someone may be killing them off one by one, EVEN THOUGH all the while, bloody lines have appeared on the wall after every murder. The killer is literally ticking the murders off right in front of their faces, and it still takes four more deaths AND the heroine presenting a diary that explains in detail why all of this is happening before the characters start being proactive about protecting themselves. 
 And THEN, their version of proactive is wandering the house like lost children, checking it for murderers in such a way as to easily end up separated and dead. They have the survival instincts of lemmings. 
 The mystery is predictable 
 ...AKA the easiest way to make this whole book an exercise in tedium. The "why" is by far the most interesting part of one of these closed-circle mysteries, and we know why the characters have been gathered for slaughter less than halfway in. In fact, savvy readers will probably figure out why within the first few chapters, since they're littered with expositional conversations that, in adherence with the Rules of Writing, must eventually be important, otherwise they wouldn't be there. But just in case you missed those, halfway in we get a fucking diary that gives context to all of those pointed conversations and spells out the motive, because why in god's name would we want mystery in a mystery novel? 
 In the end, it doesn't even matter who is actually doing the killing, because we already know why, and obviously it's going to tie in to that in some bullshit ~twisty~ way. I kept hoping that there would be a different bullshit twist - that the diary would be a smokescreen, or the heroine would have a closer connection to the murders, hell, even the old unreliable narrator trick would have been something. But no, it was the same sort of boring, and as far as I could tell, completely un-foreshadowed, gotcha! reveal that you'd get in any generic slasher flick. 
 Oh, and speaking of slashers: 
 The execution of the murders is preposterous, and even if it weren't preposterous, it would be dumb 
 This is the part that really made me just slam myself face-first into my desk with despair. SPOILER WARNING. 
 So, the idea is that every person gathered on the island was in some way perceived to be responsible for the suicide of a bullied teenage girl. All of their interactions with her are conveniently documented in her diary, utilizing seemingly normal words and phrases like "shot through the heart", "choke on those words," and "backstabbing." 
 So, guess what it TOTALLY makes sense to base the central murder gimmick around? 
 That's right, ridiculously commonly-used, meaningless phrases occasionally orchestrated into absurdly over the top deathtraps! 
 This is the dumbest fucking slasher gimmick I've ever seen. Dumb and so unimpressive that you don't even realize there IS a gimmick to the murders until like the fourth or fifth death, where the heroine retroactively assigns symbolic meaning to the deaths that have already occurred. 
 I have to run this down for you, because it's just so...simultaneously contrived, and yet lazily executed: 
 Read full review at You're Killing.Us (ft. HTML I can't use on Goodreads, lol)