Beware this boy

I finished the second Tom Tyler mystery series over the weekend, Beware this boy by Maureen Jennings. I really enjoyed the first book; the pacing and story were well done. But this second one is a bit of a mess.

Tyler goes to help investigate an explosion at a munitions factory in Birmingham and in the process we meet an entirely new group of people. Jennings takes a lot of time at the beginning to introduce us to these characters and get us invested in them, but she does nothing to wrap up their stories in the end. It’s almost as if she wasn’t quite sure what to do and we have a final 20 pages filled with action and then it’s over.

So now I’m sitting here wondering about those characters. What happened with them? I know I can make something up in my head, but even just about 10 pages of falling action at the end of this story would’ve been helpful. A main character dies and there is almost no reaction. It’s odd and I’m not quite sure why, but I guess I’ll probably never know.