A dark and vindictive tale.
When Sierton High’s cheer captain, Ella Moore, is found dead after a party, all eyes turn to the other seniors who were with her that night.
Each one had a reason to want the white-blond Ella, a vicious bully, to disappear. Her boyfriend, Scott Russell, recently discovered that Ella was cheating on him. Lucy Aguilar resented Ella for stealing Scott from her. Naomi Chen was being blackmailed by Ella over information that could have destroyed Naomi’s reputation. Then there’s brooding outcast Isaac Caldwell, whose sister was driven by Ella’s bullying to the point of attempting suicide a few years prior. Newcomer Dawn Foster, who just moved to Wisconsin, was also at the party but left before anything seemed amiss. As rumors spread, Dawn starts digging into her classmates’ secrets for clues that could lead her to the murderer. In alternating chapters set three years in the past, shy, self-conscious freshman Hannah Smith joins the Sierton cheerleading team and immediately becomes the target of relentless mockery led by who else but Ella. The story begins as a typical murder mystery, but a chilling twist in the third act will make readers rethink everything they’ve read up to that point. Until then, it’s up to Dawn’s investigation and the tension between the past and present storylines to keep readers going, since most characters lack the depth to garner much interest. Central characters are white; Lucy is Latina, and Naomi is white and Asian.
A dark and vindictive tale. (content warning, author’s note) (Thriller. 14-18)Pub Date: May 7, 2024
ISBN: 9781728293394
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Sourcebooks Fire
Review Posted Online: Feb. 17, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2024
Readers will be captivated by this twisty thriller and its uncompromising protagonist.
The mother Annabel Price thought was dead returns with a story about where she’s been—but 18-year-old Bel knows she’s lying.
Ever since Rachel Price’s unexplained disappearance 16 years ago, true-crime fans have come up with plentiful theories about what happened. Bel and her family members, who are white, cobbled together lives for themselves after a jury found Bel’s father, Charlie, not guilty of murdering his wife. Beset with medical bills for his elderly father, Charlie recently agreed to participate in a documentary about the unsolved mystery. Black British filmmaker Ramsey Lee is well into the process of interviewing the Prices when his project gets an unanticipated boost after an exhausted, disheveled Rachel staggers back into town. Rachel is eager to resume her role in the family, but the inconsistencies in her accounts raise alarms for Bel. With the help of the youngest member of the filmmaking team, Bel sets out to learn what really happened. Along the way, someone else disappears, and Bel uncovers a tangle of lies that make it impossible for her to trust people she thought she knew. When things come to a head the night of her grandfather’s 85th birthday party, Bel ends up in a race for her life. The last quarter of the novel tears along at a breakneck pace before arriving at a satisfying and unexpected conclusion.
Readers will be captivated by this twisty thriller and its uncompromising protagonist. (Thriller. 14-18)Pub Date: April 2, 2024
ISBN: 9780593374207
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Delacorte
Review Posted Online: Feb. 3, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2024
This scorching glimpse of life (and death) among the moneyed classes hits its marks, if a bit mechanically.
A summertime stay on Martha’s Vineyard confirms everything Linden thinks about rich people.
Best known for emotional YA romances, Cotugno tries her hand at an emotional whodunit—and readers who can roll with the weird attraction her protagonist seems to exert on the two main young women here may find themselves caught up in an engrossing whirl of, as the title promises, lies, secrets, and louche living. Hardly has he arrived for a two-week stay at palatial August House than Michael Linden and his host and boarding school roommate Jasper’s twin sister, Eliza, are bedroom-bound; his ghosted former platonic friend Holiday turns up; and Greg, despised boyfriend of another houseguest, winds up in a coma after an apparent accident. Dragged along by Holiday, who, along with inexplicably letting bygones be bygones, turns out to be an enthusiastic amateur sleuth, scholarship student Linden finds plenty of fuel for his (supposedly) secret resentment of the privileged classes and the way they can get away with anything. Though not, as it turns out after a comfortably conventional denouement complete with surprise confession, murder. Also, as a tease at the end suggests, for all that he comes clean about several secrets of his own, Linden leads the pack in the “things to hide” department. Aside from one prominent supporting character—a brown-skinned lacrosse champion—the central cast reads White.
This scorching glimpse of life (and death) among the moneyed classes hits its marks, if a bit mechanically. (Mystery. 14-18)Pub Date: May 2, 2023
ISBN: 9780593433287
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Delacorte
Review Posted Online: March 13, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2023
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