Rose Cleary is crouched on the rotting floor of an unfinished house, phone torch in one hand, sweeping weeds aside with the other. She is looking for small bones. A dead mouse near the basement opening is too far gone to use, but by the empty doorframe she finds something better, a pale, nearly whole fragment that might once have belonged to a bird, and she lifts it into her bag with tweezers. Rose casts bones like this into silver and sets cheap stones in the middle; it is the one thing that has felt right since her mother’s accident. Then the floor creaks, and she knows she did not make the sound. Someone calls her name, in a girl’s voice. The Worst Is Yet to Come by Trish Lundy begins its real story in that dark hallway, and it never quite lets its heroine back out of it.
What follows is quick and brutal. Rose had walked to the abandoned development straight from a graduation party, where she found her best friend Kennedy in a bedroom with her ex. She wakes on the ground with blood in her eyes and a broken tooth, flees a hooded figure across the road, and by the early hours is watching Kennedy wheeled into the emergency room. By the end of the week, the people who loved Kennedy have quietly decided which of the two girls should have come home.
A Survivor Nobody Believes
The novel’s strongest idea is that surviving can look like guilt. Rose cannot describe her attacker. Her memory of the night has holes in it. The tests come back with results she knows are wrong, the police keep circling back to her, and her best friend’s father will not meet her eye in a car park. When the family asks her to stay away from the funeral, she walks two miles in summer heat to attend anyway, with a jewellery hammer in her pocket in case the person who came for her comes again. The scene in the dim corridor behind the church, where footsteps follow her past a statue of Mary, is one of the book’s best: frightening, a little absurd, and entirely in character.
Lundy is good at the guilt underneath the fear. The last thing Rose said to Kennedy was that she did not want to listen, and The Worst Is Yet to Come by Trish Lundy keeps returning her to that refusal without ever turning it into a lesson. At home, her mother lies upstairs with a traumatic brain injury, able to squeeze a hand but not to talk, and the evenings Rose spends curled beside her watching Forensic Files are among the tenderest pages in the book. A girl who has already lost her mother once, without anyone dying, now has to learn the past tense for her best friend.
The Worst Is Yet to Come, and So Is the Grief
Kennedy is dead before the plot properly starts, yet she remains the liveliest presence in it. Rose knows her through what she left behind: a lip gloss in the wrong boy’s drawer, a phone thread full of messages that do not match what she said out loud, and, best of all, a letter folded into the pocket of a borrowed black dress, discovered on the walk to her own funeral. The letter is cheerful and cryptic and arrives far too late, and the novel lets that small cruelty sit.
There is a second grief running underneath, seventeen years older. In 2009 a teen mother named Abigail Amaro walked into the same birch woods and was never found. Her ex-boyfriend Brian, eighteen and already written off by the town, narrates his side of that summer in short, frightened chapters. He warms bottles for his baby daughter, nurses a hockey career that is gone, and makes a series of bad decisions that are entirely believable for a terrified boy. The Worst Is Yet to Come by Trish Lundy handles him with more sympathy than anyone in his story does, and the result is the book’s most unsettling argument: that a community can settle on a culprit long before anyone has asked a proper question.
Love in a Clean Truck
The boy who finds Rose on the roadside that night is Jake, the school’s star quarterback, who goes faintly green at the sight of her blood and later details his truck himself rather than let her pay for it. He also, to her astonishment, read Shirley Jackson in AP Literature, and their exchange about which Blackwood sister her overprotective father thinks she is might be the funniest flirtation in recent YA. The romance is warm, a little breathless, and frank about desire without becoming explicit.
It is also cleverly placed. Rose’s instincts tell her to trust no one, and her heart is busy ignoring them. The novel is shrewd about how much a frightened girl will overlook in someone kind, and it uses the reader’s affection for Jake as a lever. Those who come to The Worst Is Yet to Come by Trish Lundy mainly for the love story will be well served, if occasionally nervous.
Where It Comes Apart for Trish Lundy
The weaknesses are real, and most of them stem from the same source: a plot that needs Rose to act alone and keeps bending the world to make sure she does.
- Rose’s judgement. Trespassing, sneaking out and lying to her father are fair enough for a grieving teenager, but one choice in the middle of the book, made to protect herself, will cost her some readers’ sympathy for good.
- The voice’s habits. Her narration is funny and alive, yet it leans on stacked rhetorical questions and verbal shrugs, and across nearly three hundred pages the tic becomes audible.
- Convenient arrivals. A man connected to the 2009 case turns up in a hospital lift, at a graduation party and outside a church, always at the moment the plot needs a nudge.
The larger problem is scale. The wrongdoing that eventually surfaces is bigger and more institutional than the climax has room for, and the final chapters explain more than they dramatise. The Worst Is Yet to Come by Trish Lundy builds a fine atmosphere of a town that owes too much to the one place that employs it, then resolves the mystery in a rush. The closing pages, which open a new door rather than shutting the old one, will divide readers.
Final Thoughts
None of that undoes what works. In The Worst Is Yet to Come by Trish Lundy, the author writes teenage grief with unusual precision, and her heroine’s dark humour keeps a sad book from becoming a heavy one. Readers should know that it deals in strangulation, sedation, bereavement, disability, adolescent pregnancy and suicide, all handled without sensationalism.
Those who want more of this mix of small-town investigation and a girl nobody takes seriously should go back to A Good Girl’s Guide to Murder by Holly Jackson, which set the template for teenage sleuths working a cold case against adult indifference. We Won’t All Survive by Kate Alice Marshall offers a colder, more horror-forward take on young people and an old disappearance. And Jake was right: Shirley Jackson’s We Have Always Lived in the Castle is the perfect companion for anyone who finished this wondering what a town does to the girls it decides are strange.
Rose ends the book much as she began it, picking small, beautiful things out of the dirt. The Worst Is Yet to Come by Trish Lundy suggests she has found a better place to look.