HERE LIES A VENGEFUL BITCH

A dead girl seeks the truth about her violent murder in this horror-fueled adventure.

Bad girl—“to be honest, I think I’d rather be dead than good”—Annie Lane wakes up after her death in a freezing river. She’s on top of New Jersey’s Resurrection Peak, near a desolate, ghost-filled town with no clear memory of how she got there. Annie finds community at Chapel House, an abandoned mansion where she meets a crew of the similarly undead. They include Sam, a James Dean look-alike whom she becomes attracted to. With Sam’s occasional help, Annie begins an investigation to find her murderer, starting with confronting her musician ex-boyfriend, Morgan “Gun” Donovan, whose show she attended the night of her death. She also discovers that Maura, her Princeton-bound, aspiring journalist best friend, has been missing since the night she died, and Annie becomes determined to find her. She gets no support from her cruel and neglectful mother, but Maura’s dad, who’s the local sheriff, has always treated Annie like she was his own daughter. The visceral language in Crowley’s debut punctuates the nonstop action and brings the eerie supernatural scenes to life. Unexplained plot holes make for uneven storytelling, however, and the lack of clear worldbuilding is frustrating. Main characters are cued white.

A plot-driven revenge story that struggles to clearly set the scene.