After a horrific accident, one teenager and her friends begin to suspect that there is something very wrong in their quiet little town.
This first book in Ashta’s Ridgemore series finds Joss Bryson and her best friends—Hunt Fletcher, Layla Rafferty, Brady Rafferty, and Griffin Conway (on whom Joss has a devastating secret crush)—looking forward to their senior year of high school when the unthinkable happens: Brady suffers a fall from a balcony and dies…except he doesn’t. Despite being impaled on exposed rebar, Brady makes a miraculous recovery that surprises everyone—except for the friend group’s parents, who suddenly begin acting strangely and attempt to downplay Brady’s accident. Soon, Brady begins suffering from increasingly realistic nightmares about him and his friends growing up in a lab that begin to feel more like memories: “Everything about it feels familiar, like I’d know it again if I saw it. And, guys, when we were there, we didn’t call our parents Mom or Dad. We didn’t even know their names. We were their patients, their experiments, nothing more.” As Joss and her friends slowly uncover the truth, the arrival of a stranger (whose snake oil salesman persona practically screams, ‘I’m evil!’) threatens everything they have ever known and loved. Ashta’s natural-sounding dialogue thankfully never panders to the teenage cast. The various revelations strewn throughout the novel prove genuinely surprising, moving the plot forward in refreshingly organic ways. The author has created a loveably acerbic and witty narrator in Joss, whose sarcasm can’t hide a fierce love for and loyalty to her friends. From the novel’s opening line (“As I tipped back my beer, I strained to hear what Layla was saying to that jackass Rich over the noise of the party”), the narrative builds momentum as it moves toward vaguely sinister territory before the jaw-dropping cliffhanger of an ending, which will leave readers impatiently awaiting the next installment.
A crackling, well-written yarn that expertly takes its spitfire characters through plenty of twists and turns.