Killer by Sara Shepard

Wicked left off with a party at Spencer's house. The PLLs found Ian's dead body in the woods. By the time they find Officer Wilden at the party and drag him outside, Ian has vanished. The police look for him, but eventually call off searching and say that the girls were making the whole thing up. Nobody is sure if Ian is actually dead. Spencer uses her sister's laptop and gets IMs from someone claiming to be Ian, but we're not actually sure what's what.

The big event in Killer is the opening of a hotel called the Radley. It used to be a sanitarium for troubled children. Remember that, because it's important for later. Aria is invited by her mom, who still doesn't know that her skeevy boyfriend hit on Aria. Aria spends the book getting closer to Jason DiLaurentis, Alison's brother. Jason is a little off, flying into rages for seemingly no reason. He freaks out at Aria when she mentions the name of the hotel, and later on, Emily finds an old guest log from the sanitarium- Radley, and it has Jason's name in it over and over.

Speaking of Emily, she gets way close with new boyfriend Issac, in the carnal sense. Unfortunately, his mother starts to hint that she knows and verbally attacks Emily in an Applebee's bathroom. When Emily reasonably tells Issac all of this, he thinks she's being an attention whore like his last girlfriend who claimed the same things. Oh, Issac. In the end, Issac finds a picture of Emily that his mother mutilated, he confronts her, and she freaks out. Emily still won't take him back, for now, because he didn't trust her.

Hanna is still a total entitled princess and my least favorite character. Stepsister Kate decides that she wants to go out with Mike Montgomery, Aria's little brother and lacrosse boy. Hanna decides that she must have him, besides he once groped her years ago, so she has dibs. Mike goes around juggling both girls, but Hanna gets him to be exclusive by agreeing to take him to the prom. At the hotel party, Kate admits that she only ever pretended to like Mike to fool around with Hanna. Just a little revenge for telling everyone that she had herpes. Mike was also using her to win a bet with his friends, but they decide that they are even because she was using him in the first place. I hate them both. So. Much.

Poor little Spencer meets with her biological mother and she's all fancy and rich. They have such a wonderful time that Spencer is determined to move to New York to be with her. It doesn't help that Spencer's parents are total a-holes. Seriously, I have no idea what their issue is- that she told the truth about her dumb Golden Orchid essay? They spend the book sending her car back to the dealer and mocking her when her computer crashes. The only explanation I can think of is that they are secretly going broke. Spencer uses her college fund to purchase a loft from her mother's realtor, but it turns out not so much. She got scammed, the loft doesn't exist, that's not really her mom, and her college fund is all gone.

A shows up in this book, but she's more helpful than threatening. All A does is urge everyone to solve Ali's murder. This makes me wonder if there may be a different A now. The PLLs gather at the end to go over all their clues so far, when the woods behind Spencer's house are set on fire. They rescue someone from the blaze, someone who looks just like Alison.