BEYOND THE CEMETERY GATE

A teenager unwittingly puts herself in peril as she works to clear her deceased father’s name in Biel’s YA thriller.

Sixteen-year-old Chloe Cowyn’s world is turned upside down when she finds her father, Dean, dead with a needle in his arm in the Wisconsin cemetery for which he’s the caretaker. The local police are content to treat the case as an overdose by an addict. However, Chloe refuses to believe that she wouldn’t know that the only other person in her household was using drugs. A TV crime drama buff, she decides to investigate her father’s death herself, but she has two problems to overcome. First, Maggie Gill, her aunt and only living relative, is a foreign correspondent who’s undercover and unreachable for three weeks. To gain freedom from well-meaning but intrusive adults, she tells everyone that Maggie has arrived unexpectedly, which allows Chloe to move back into her home alone. After discovering that Dean’s savings have disappeared, she takes a job as a server at a retro diner. She and Jarvis Keen, her chemistry partner-turned-boyfriend, discover that her family’s criminal past has come back to haunt her. In this first book of the Maggie & Chloe Mysteries series, Biel has created a winning protagonist in Chloe; Maggie only shows up late in the proceedings, so the extent of her contribution will have to be evaluated in future volumes. Stubborn Chloe finds herself in over her head for much of the story, largely because she has difficulty trusting others, aside from Jarvis, whose time with her gives him an escape from his troubled home life. There’s also a solid cast of supporting characters, led by diner owner Molly Bell and the police chief, Barnett. Biel also effectively makes use of three different narrative perspectives—primarily Chloe’s, supplemented by third-person flashbacks featuring Dean and the first-person viewpoint of an unknown “Watcher.” One quibble is that residents of a small Wisconsin town surely would be more aware of suspicious visitors. Overall, though, this is a strong beginning to a lively hero’s adventures.

A gripping mystery that succeeds due to a headstrong protagonist who’s unwilling to fail.