Blacklands by Belinda Bauer

Kids are very impressionable. Their future and the length of their childhood depends on how they are raised or how susceptible they are to the elements around them.

In summary, this book started out as a psychological ... thriller (?) and ended as a crime novel. The story and events all fit but I read between the lines a lot so ... heh. I find it disturbing that a kid can read through a serial killer's letters and get his hidden messages so easy. I just keep telling myself that he is obsessed about the issue so he did a lot of research which is how anyone is like, no matter what age, when obsessing about something. It's just that their correspondence is like a recipe for a serial killer in the making. He doesn't seem to be a victim but a protege. The fact that they understand each other means they think alike. Here's a kid that's so disturbed about how not "normal" his family is so he finds answers and he thinks he will find them through the root of all the bitterness of the adults in his family. From the beginning, the author built an image of a kid who grew up too fast. But then halfway through the book he forgot about all of his troubles because someone significant came back into their lives which goes to show somewhere in his troubled personality, there's a kid just craving for normalcy and everything that comes with it. And then the crime novel began. Which is how crime novels usually are. For something so dark I liked that the ending gave me some sort of closure.

This part made me cry