DEADLY ANIMALS

A teenage girl with a taste for the macabre makes a series of horrific discoveries that turn her life and the lives of everyone in her British neighborhood upside down.

Fourteen-year-old Ava Bonney loves nothing better than to study the decomposing bodies of animals she finds littered along the motorway that runs through Birmingham. But when she accidentally comes across the bodies of two young people—one a teenager like herself, and the other a small boy—who have had their throats ripped out by a set of human teeth, she realizes a predator is stalking the town’s children. In this chilling novel, Tierney pairs the precocious Ava with an open-minded police detective named Seth Delahaye to create an unlikely—and memorable—crime fighting duo. An “eternal student” gifted with the willingness to learn from everyone he meets, Delahaye appreciates Ava’s intelligence and preternatural ability to read between the lines of physical evidence, which he witnesses firsthand when she begins anonymously calling the police station with information about the murders. Her observation that the murderer is a deeply disturbed young person who suffers from clinical lycanthropy goes against what Delahaye expects to find. But the closer the two get to uncovering the killer, the more it becomes clear that Ava’s shocking conclusions hold more truth than anyone could want or imagine. By turns terrifying and heartbreaking in its depictions of the bloodthirsty killer—and, by extension, the brutality that lies at the heart of every human being—this eloquent, darkly suspenseful debut novel will haunt the reader’s imagination.

An edge-of-your-seat thriller with a savage twist.