Serial Box’s Dead Air, by Gwenda Bond, Rachel Caine, and Carrie Ryan

Is anyone here not yet familiar with Serial Box? It’s a website that creates serial fiction and doles them out in weekly episodes for your delectation and delight. As you can see from the folks who worked on Dead Air — or just by popping in to their website and taking a look around — they’ve developed a terrific stable of authors and a really interesting slate of stories. Subscribing to a Serial Box story makes me feel like I’m waiting at the harbor for the boats carrying the latest installment of a Wilkie Collins novel.¹

Dead Air is a YA novel that riffs on the craze for true crime podcasts: MacKenzie Walker receives an anonymous tip on her college radio show that a decades-old murder at a horse farm may not be quite as solved as everyone believed. As she begins to investigate, aided by the son of the Dead woman, she finds herself enmeshed in a world of horse-racing dynasties, secret societies, and dirty cops. Plus, there’s an accompanying podcast where MacKenzie shares (some of) her discoveries. (This was actually what lured me in on Dead Air. What can I say, I’m a sucker for multimedia storytelling.)

Since I’m not a true crime buff and have never listened to a single episode of Serial (YEAH YOU HEARD ME), I can’t speak to Dead Air‘s success as a fictional piece of true crime. But the podcast is slick and fun and very good at imitating the genre of podcast it’s selling itself as. True crime people, please let me know your views.

Where Dead Air really shone for me was as a mystery. I love mysteries that explore weird subcultures, so I was really into all the stuff about Peg (the dead lady) trying to clean all the doping out of the horse-racing business. The authors also have fun with the metafiction of MacKenzie’s podcast: Because she’s trying to solve this murder in a podcast format, there are repercussions for her, the people around her, and the crime she’s investigating. Which is fun! As a reader and listener, I felt delightfully (because it’s fictional) complicit in the consequences that came from the podcast. I also love that there are some intense last-minute revelations. From the word go, MacKenzie has a good guess at the murderer’s identity: The husband always did it. The more she investigates, the more she finds ways that this crime touched her own life and the lives of her family members. It’s personal. Those reveals are parceled out nicely, leading up to a terrific climax.

For me, the romance worked less well. I don’t mind the frequency of romance plotlines in YA novels, but I was never terribly committed to MacKenzie’s romance with Ryan. When she begins to suspect him of being involved in Terrible Events (I won’t specify what those are), I couldn’t understand why she was still romantically interested in him. He never seemed interesting to begin with!

A bigger failing for me — and this should also serve as a trigger warning — was the depiction of suicide in Dead Air. A character appears to die by suicide over the course of this book, and MacKenzie thinks it was actually a murder. I know the apparent-suicide-actually-murder is a staple of murder mysteries, but a few recent irresponsible portrayals of suicide in popular media (looking at you, A Star Is Born and A Million Little Pieces) have me feeling twitchy about using it as a plot device/plot twist.

MacKenzie learns the method the person used, and she describes that on the podcast in specific, explicit detail. There is a lot of research indicating that explicit depictions or descriptions of the method someone used to kill themselves correlates with an increased risk of suicide contagion; multiple organizations that deal with suicide have therefore recommended that media outlets not do this. I really, really wish Dead Air had also not done it, even though — spoiler! — the character ends up not really having died by suicide.

Another trigger warning: This story deals with drug addiction, albeit in a more engaged and thoughtful way than how it deals with suicide. MacKenzie’s cousin died from a drug overdose, and that motivates MacKenzie’s behavior and choices in various parts of this story.

Note: I got Dead Air comped to me by the folks at Serial Box for review consideration. This has not impacted the contents of my review.