BANISHED

In this formulaic, not-even-barely credible supernatural thriller decorated with stock characters and tiresome chases, high-school sophomore Hailey Tarbell has lived her entire life as an outcast, along with her drug-dealing grandmother and her developmentally challenged foster brother, in small-town Gypsum, Mo. She wonders about her strange and newly discovered ability to heal injuries and the men watching her from their car with tinted windows until her long-lost aunt, Prairie, arrives and explains their mysterious background. Hailey and Prairie descend from a village of Irish Healers, who immigrated to the United States and became known as the Banished. A mad scientist, under the pretense of love, has been studying Prairie’s DNA, hoping to create his own Healers, which in turn can bring the near-dead back to “life” as an army of zombies, for sale to the highest-bidding government. With the help of Kaz, a Banished descendant from a splinter village in Poland, they rush to sabotage the scientist’s lab in Chicago. A weak ending with an irritating wait-a-minute-I-forgot-something moment leaves room for a sequel. (Paranormal. YA)