Mateo’s life is turned upside down the day U.S. Pip and Andie are white, and Sal is of Indian descent.Ī treat for mystery readers who enjoy being kept in suspense.Ī Mexican American boy takes on heavy responsibilities when his family is torn apart. Jackson’s debut is well-executed and surprises readers with a connective web of interesting characters and motives.

Online articles about the case and interview transcripts are provided throughout, and Pip’s capstone logs offer insights into her thought processes as new evidence and suspects arise. Pip’s sleuthing is both impressive and accessible. But someone is watching, and Pip may be in more danger than she realizes. With his help, Pip digs deeper, unveiling unsavory facts about Andie and the real reason Sal’s friends couldn’t provide him with an alibi. Unable to ignore the gaps in the case, Pip sets out to prove Sal’s innocence, beginning with interviewing his younger brother, Ravi. Andie’s body was never recovered, and Sal was assumed by most to be guilty of abduction and murder.

The original investigation concluded with most of the evidence pointing to Sal, who was found dead in the woods, apparently by suicide. For her senior capstone project, Pip researches the disappearance of former Fairview High student Andie, last seen on April 18, 2014, by her younger sister, Becca. Pip has known and liked Sal since childhood he’d supported her when she was being bullied in middle school. Whiteness is situated as the norm, and all main characters are white one of Lilly’s best friends is gay.Ī compelling, lyrical twist and turn through sisterhood and secrecy.Įveryone believes that Salil Singh killed his girlfriend, Andrea Bell, five years ago-except Pippa Fitz-Amobi. A late twist to the story handily wraps up the plot, and readers with a taste for romance will thrill to Lilly’s attraction to archetypical bad boy Patrick. The imaginative, vividly described passages can at times feel a bit florid, but they effectively establish an undercurrent of almost poetic, fairy-tale flavored imagery. Alternating narration between the past and present, in poems and diary entries and from the perspectives of all three sisters plus Boyd and a troubled newcomer named Patrick, this mystery winds its way through their backstories, revealing that Kit had been behaving strangely in the months leading up to her death.

Adding to their grief is the fact that their adored neighbor Boyd, who has long been like a protective brother to them, is in jail, accused of her murder. When Kit is found in the woods with a head injury, dead of hypothermia, her younger sisters, Tessa and Lilly, struggle to comprehend what’s happened. Grief and confusion surround two young women whose sister has just died under mysterious circumstances in this suspenseful novel by Hillyer ( Winter Glass, 2018, etc.).

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