The Lifeguard by richie tankersley cusick. 1988, 212 pages.
From the back cover:
"Kelsey's summer should have been paradise: An invitation to rich and famous Beverly Island, complete with sun-drenched beaches and three gorgeous lifeguards on duty. But Kelsey's summer is the opposite of paradise. It starts with the note under her pillow from a girl who's missing. Then there's the crazy man in the lighthouse who won't leave Kelsey alone. And there have been a number of suspicious drownings...At least she has the lifeguards around to protect her...Poor Kelsey. Poor Kelsey. Someone forgot to tell her that lifeguards don't always like to save lives."
Review:
A rare miss from Richie Cusick. It isn't a bad book, it's just not as good as some of her other work. Things start off promisingly enough from the point of view of a crazed (and unknown) lifeguard reflecting on a murder. It then shifts to Kelsey's arrival to the island with her Mother. They arrive to visit her Mom's boyfriend and his two lifeguard sons, but quickly find out his daughter is missing and presumed dead. What happened to his daughter? Who's terrorizing Kelsey and playing games with her? And who is the crazed lifeguard? The answers aren't terribly exciting.
Kelsey is a fine and typical YA horror lead, but two of the other lifeguard characters are beyond annoying. Anything Kelsey witnesses is dismissed immediately as a joke or her imagination by them and it gets old. Skip is the sarcastic one and Neale the "brooding" one. His character especially is hard to endure with his nasty attitude. In the end, the identity of the killer is extremely obvious and not much happens throughout the 212 pages.
Perhaps my expectations were too high with this particular author, as she authored one of my favorite YA horror books of all time, "The Mall". But it's still worth a read as long as you keep your expectations in check.
