Aforethought? With Malice by Eileen Cook

Beep, Beep. Beep. Beep.

My hand couldn't muster the energy to turn off the alarm. The blanket felt wrong.

This isn't my bed.

I hoped I'd remembered to call my mom. I was going to be in deep shit for not coming home.

I forced my eyes open. I turned my head to see the alarm but as soon as I moved, there was a shot of pain like a dental drill. My vision blurred. It wasn't a clock. It was some kind of machine. Plastic tubing connected it to me.

I was in a hospital.

Jill Charron's last memory is of a party celebrating the successful run of the senior production of Grease, with her best friend Simone in the starring role of Sandy. But then she learns that that memory is six weeks old, that she remembers nothing since that night--not her long-awaited Adventure Abroad in Italy, and certainly not the car crash that killed Simone, not the chartered flight back to the U.S. her wealthy father arranged or the weeks in and out of consciousness since, nor any explanation for Simone's death. At the rehabilitation hospital, her psychiatrist tells her she has retrograde amnesia, a deep inability to remember anything in the six weeks since the cast party.

As the next weeks go by, what she is told about the time in Italy is even more disturbing. Jill reads that students on the tour reported that she had slapped Simone during a quarrel over a boy, Nicolo, one of the Italian guides, with whom she had become close during the first week abroad, and that the next day Jill, with Simone in the passenger seat, had driven a rented car off a road and into a ravine in a town she's never heard of. Two Italian police claim evidence that the accident was no accident, but the result of malice aforethought on Jill's part, cause for her extradition to Italy for trial for murder.

Jill begins to read news reports, which recount the jealous quarrel with Simone and report a bloody knife with her fingerprints in the wrecked car. A blog called "Justice for Simone" reveals some of her classmates picturing the reserved, studious Jill as a vindictive frenemy, jealous of the outgoing, popular Simone. Jill begins to have fragmentary memories from the time in Italy, including one horrifying moment in a car with Simone screaming in terror beside her. And when Jill learns that Simone was the abusive troll who caused her to shut down her blog, she realizes that the girl she thought was her best friend clearly was something else.

Had Simone intentionally tried to take Jill's first boyfriend away just to prove she could? Had Simone smugly told her the truth when confronted? And had Jill reacted with enough malice aforethought to risk ending her own life to take Simone's?

Eileen Cook's With Malice (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2016) is suspenseful page-turner that doles out evidence but leave leave many questions, a teaser of a mystery with no classic solution, a finish that will doubtless leave young adult readers with different conclusions as to where, if with anyone, the true guilt lies. But, oh, what a trip this novel is, with its slow but relentless revelation of the hidden intricacies of the human heart.

Between the Dark and the Light: Ask the Dark by Henry Turner

I stopped.

A boy lay on the bank of the stream. He was naked, that boy, 'cept one shoe, with his body on the sand and rocks but his head partways in the water, his hair waving like weeds in the stream. I saw his face, all covered with cuts and blood.

I seen a piece of paper all red and bright, stuck to his dead ass. I bent over and snatched it up. I knew I couldn't just throw it over once I touched it, so I put it in my pocket.

Billy Zeets can't sleep. His dad's hurt, can't work, and their house is being foreclosed, and for some reason the dead, dark of night calls Billy, fitting his mood, and he wanders the streets and backyards and woods while the town sleeps. But when Billy finds the mutilated body of one of the boys in his town who have gone missing, Billy knows that someone else is using the night for darker purposes.

Billy is determined to find a way to make money to help his father, but he's just come out of a wild period, vandalizing and petty-thievery, and he's not high on anyone's hiring list. Occasionally working with Richie, a town n'eer-do-well who pays Billy to help load abandoned scrap metal into his pickup for sale, Billy is tempted to do a little shady junking himself, and on one nighttime expedition, he scales a tree up onto a roof and explores some promising storage boxes in the attic of Miss Gurpy, a once-well-to-do recluse, and finds one box filled with jewelry and vows to come back with a bag to carry it away.

Then Billy finds he's not the only one who knows what's in those boxes.

Coming into the room, I'd shut the door behind me. So what I done was step back maybe a yard, one big swooping step, to where I'd be behind the door if it opened. And all the while I was hearing somebody walking through the house. The footsteps stopped, and then they came on again, toward me. Whoever it was just come in the room and stood there.

Then I heard some shuffling and a light came on. Flashlight was that new kind that only shines where you point it. I don't think I breathed at all. I just stood there, three feet behind him.

All I could think was, If he turns, I'm caught.

'Course, I didn't know then who this fucker was, and that if he turned I was dead.

But working with Richie in a different house, Billy sees those same boxes, and something else. A sack of cement with a piece missing from the label, and Billy knows where that missing piece is--in his wallet where he'd saved it.

A little piece of torn red paper.

On my knees I went over to it, scuffing crost the floor, and where a piece was torn off the bag, I fit the piece.

It fit perfectly.

Now Billy thinks he knows who has been torturing and killing those boys in his town. And then he realizes that the murderer knows who he is and what he knows, too.

Henry Turner's Ask the Dark (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Clarion Books, 2015). is a slow-building cat-and-mouse thriller that is as dark as its setting, taking place mostly in the dark of night and among the dark secrets of his small town. Billy is an unlikely hero, a seeming loser, but dogged and ultimately possessed of great moral courage as he stalks his psychopathic stalker to a climax in a dank cellar that will leave young adult readers breathless. With rough talk for which he often begs "Skuze my language," a protagonist from Hardtimesville who proves that despite it all, Billy Zeets is a winner. Fans of teen suspense thrillers will take to this one, set on the dark side of a leafy little town where there be monsters as dreadful as any dragons.

Who Killed Coach Killdare? Buzz Kill by Beth Fantaskey

Head football coach "Hollerin' Hank" Kildare was having such a massive meltdown that even from where I was standing, I could see his trademark blue vein popping in his neck and the usual flecks of spittle flying out of his mouth.

Well, maybe I couldn't see the spit, but from the way demoted, one-time quarterback Mike Price kept flinching, I was pretty sure Mike was getting a shower during the game.

As the student reporter assigned to this "bleepin'" game--and daughter of Assistant Coach Jack Ostermeyer--I should have known what had just happened on the field, but the truth was, I didn't really like sports. However, I couldn't overlook it when Coach abruptly wheeled around and, completely unprovoked, booted our school's costumed mascot Buzz the Bee right in the stinger, launching him, stumbling and flailing wildly, into my archenemy Vivienne Fitch, sending her sprawling on her butt, so everybody got a view up her flippy little "cheer" skirt.

That really should've made me laugh, but I actually kind of winced. If this ends up on youTube, Viv is going to murder Mr. Killdare and stomp a poor, innocent bee.

Now... Killdare was dead. There was no doubt about it. Old Coach Killdare was as dead as a door-nail. At least, for Millie Ostermeyer, when she stumbles onto his corpse, reposing on a piece of maintenance equipment in a dark, odoriferous storage room under the stadium. It's not a pretty sight, prompting Millie to lose her lunch indecorously all over the cleated feet of star quarterback Chase Albright when he rushes toward her screams from the field.

Not that Millicent Ostermeyer is a sports freak who pines after star players or frequents the football field and lockers. She's mostly trying to preserve her reputation as award-winning ace girl reporter for the school paper, thereby beating Vivienne Fitch, her pom-pommed rival, to the scoop of snooping out calamitous cracks in the stadium's concrete supports. Still, gagging and gasping out apologies for barfing on his feet was not exactly the teen flick cute-meet with the gorgeous Chase she would have chosen in her lamest dreams.

Who would kill Coach Killdare?  Almost anyone!  Almost everyone who knew him had a motive. Even Millie's dad, super-upright mayor and assistant coach, has had angry confrontations with him and obviously had his sights set on the job and plush office of head coach. Then there is shamed ex-quarterback Mike Price (and his parents), deprived of a potential free-ride football scholarship, the aforementioned Vivienne Fitch, whose drive to be top of the "pops" has suffered a hit along with her dignity, not to mention the anonymous but mistreated derriere of Buzz the Bee. Plus a whole generation of gym students he had studiously bullied and belittled.

But Millie soon realizes that she has stumbled upon Coach's only supporter, the distant but hunky Chase, whose mysterious senior year appearance at Honeywell High suggests a shady past. Chase admits quietly to Millie than Coach Killdare had offered him a second chance after doing time in a state "boarding school" for juvenile offenders, and that as payback he has been mowing, raking, and taking care of the Coach's dog, not to mention leading the team in a much welcomed winning season.

Despite her worries about his past, Chase does have a key to Killdare's house, and Millie snatches the chance to emulate her childhood idol, Nancy Drew, and do some sleuthing there. Chase feels duty bound to help find the Coach's killer as well, and they agree to snoop together. Millie discovers some "lady stuff" in the bathroom, which means that Coach Killdare must have had at least one other friend, a lady friend, who left him a feminine-scripted and fond note signed "BeeBee." Chase also has an "in" to Killdare's office, located in the men's locker area, and while they are searching his desk and files, they discover the very recently deceased Mike Price, bashed and dumped into the whirlpool tank.

But then someone turns in an anonymous tip to the police that Millie's dad is the murderer and the blunt instrument used is buried in their backyard, where Inspector Lohser and his detectives indeed dig up a large and heavy athletic trophy. Now this case is not just a chance to win another investigative reporting award for Millie. It's her dad, his job, and their life at stake--putting the dead in Millie's deadline for sure.

Beth Fantaskey's forthcoming, Buzz Kill (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2014) shows off her rare flair for serio-comic teen romance thriller mysteries, and if there is such a jaw-breaking genre, she's surely its star. After having handled vampire bridegrooms and Dr. Hyde-ish alchemy, (see her earlier Jessica's Guide to Dating on the Dark Side, Jessica Rules the Dark Side, and Jekel Loves Hyde, the author jumps into the world of high-school hunks and philosophy-club nerd girl reporters with ease. Chase and Millie find themselves comfortably drawn into detecting and then into romance as the plot progresses, and progress it does, with the surprising identity of the murderer discovered, (where else?) in the locker room. It's not your mother's high school dating novel, but if a double murder mystery can still be light and funny, with some serious back stories and two unlikely but likable sweethearts, Fantaskey's latest certainly makes the team.

Publishers Weekly agrees, awarding it a starred review, and School Library Journal calls it a "character-driven novel... with "cliffhanger chapter endings, a solid mystery with a dollop of romance."

Buried Truths: The Caged Graves by Dianne K. Salerni

SARAH ANN

Wife of Ransloe Boone

Entered into Rest

November 15, 1852
Aged 22 Years

Beloved Wife and Mother

It was all ordinary information, nothing Verity had not known. Except that the marker stood beside an iron cage that completely enclosed the grave, and the grave was outside the cemetery. A hinged door at the far end of the cage was padlocked shut.

"Why?" Verity's voice was raw and hoarse. "Why is my mother's grave inside a cage?"

Impetuously, seventeen-year-old Verity Boone has accepted an offer of marriage from Nathaniel McClure, a landed young farmer whose courtship letters and gifts of poetry had convinced her to travel from Worcester, where she had lived with her aunt since her mother's death fifteen years earlier, to the small town of Catawissa, Pennsylvania, where the father she has not seen in years lives alone. Nate  is mannerly, but awkward and reserved, and the easy exchange of thoughts that flowed in their letters seems missing. Still, he  is handsome and seems to be earnestly trying to please when she suggests that they take a walk toward the small church near her father's farmhouse. What she sees there shakes her deeply.

Her mother and aunt are buried in caged graves outside the graveyard walls, in unhallowed ground. As if they were what?....Witches?" she wonders. Verity realizes with dread that there are many more secrets buried in that small community than she could have imagined, secrets that she must understand before she can remain in that place and happily make a marriage with Nate.

Her father is distant and will tell her little about her mother's death, and although her intended mother-in-law and her daughters seem welcoming and affectionate, they only hint that secrets are better left buried. But in her father's house, Verity uncovers her mother's journals which hint at mysterious deaths, deaths which came suddenly upon several members of one family which preceded her own, including her Uncle John's first wife, Asenath.  Asenath was a strange young girl, not even twenty, a maker of "charms and remedies" and a relentless searcher for the treasure supposedly hidden nearby after the Revolutionary War. Horrified, Verity reads her mother's own account of those undiagnosed deaths, including her own symptoms in the days just before her death.

"Every person in this town with the name of Clayton has fallen to it.  It is no wonder people are remembering the stories of a curse upon that wretched family!

Asenath's heart beats slow.  She waters from the eyes, nose, and mouth. Chokes if we lay her down. She is very sleepy, but we are afraid to let her sleep. Those who died fell into a stupor before they passed."

And then Verity turns the page to read her mother's last entry on the day before her death:

"Asenath pins her hopes on Miss Piper's remedies.

Pains so bad I fear I will lose this baby.
Watering like dog..."

Verity realizes that no one is telling her the whole story of her mother's death and strange burial, and she turns to the young apprentice doctor, Hadley Jones, even though she is uneasy with the strong attraction between them.

"The only way to put down a lie is to uncover the truth," she realizes, and when Hadley Jones' diagnosis of poisoning substantiates her own suspicions, Verity realizes that the murders are all tied to the story of the buried treasure and a someone's sinister manipulations to have it  all at last.  The burden of this knowledge and her divided feelings for both Nate and Hadley convince Verity that she must discover the truth behind her mother's death, and soon, before she, too, falls victim to the murderer's long-term greed.

Diane K. Salerni's forthcoming The Caged Graves (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2013) is a crackerjack Gothic romantic mystery, set in a seemingly idyllic small town in 1867 with dark but unspoken conflicts symbolized by the caged graves beside its church.  Verity is an adventurous young woman, one caught up a swirl of   mysterious and threatening events, tales of ghosts and buried gold, witchcraft, dismembered corpses, and grave robbers,  and torn between two attractive suitors earnestly vying for her love.  A solid, well-crafted romance novel built around real history and an absorbing mystery of dark family secrets just right for reading on a dark and stormy night.

Ties of Blood: Blood Wounds by Susan Beth Pfeffer

I felt the now familiar wave of panic wash over me. It was my punishment for being defiant. If I couldn't be Quiet-Never-Make-A-Fuss Willa, Mom and Jack, Brooke and Alyssa, wanted no part of me.

I couldn't even blame them. Quiet-Never-Make-A-Fuss Willa was gone, replaced by the self-pitying scene-making daughter of a....

I couldn't bring myself to define Budge, to put a label on him. Because whatever he was, I was his daughter and whether I loved him or not, whether I even knew him or not, he was a part of me, so entwined with my body and my soul that he could never be disentangled.

Susan Beth Pfeffer is a fearless writer of fiction, writing about those family relationships where others fear to tread. In her forthcoming Blood Wounds Harcourt, 2011) she goes deep into the weeds of a superficially happy blended family, with a conflicted protagonist who submerges her own feelings to maintain a surface calm and sometimes finds release for her fears only in secretly cutting herself. She watches her own mom subjugate herself and Willa to the needs of stepsisters Brooke and Alyssa, whose wealthy mother provides them with dressage training, tennis lessons, and trips abroad. Willa admits to feeling like a Cinderella sister, taking their unwanted clothes and living a much less opulent life to please her stepfather Jack.

But when Willa's barely remembered biological father Budge suddenly murders his second wife and three little girls and is seen heading toward their hometown, everything changes for Willa and her family. Warned by the police, they flee their house for concealed locations, but when her father is killed by the police staking out her house and one of her half-sisters is found decapitated in his car, Willa is forced to face the importance of that unknown family, struggling to understand how those ties of blood have left wounds on her and her mom which can damage their new family life.

Willa feels compelled to attend the funeral of her little sisters in Pryor, Texas. Suddenly Willa finds a family there, a failed family to be sure, but one that recognizes her as "all Coffey," one to which she realizes she is bound by blood and circumstance, and one which strangely helps her see the lack of honesty in her current family. Blood binds and blood wounds, but it also is the source from which she comes, and with her new understanding Willa is able to help her blended family see beyond their assumed roles to the real people beneath them.

Part thriller, part psychological drama, part coming-of-age novel, Pfeffer's latest is an honest and solid look at one family, like all families unique, at a critical turning point in their lives together. Young adult readers will find this a page turner, but will also find much to think about in Blood Wounds. As Publishers Weekly has said, "This intense psychological drama, showing the brightest and darkest sides of humanity, offers remarkable acts of courage and disturbing images of domestic violence. Willa's frankly portrayed grief, confusion, and uncertainties will have a strong impact on readers."