BY THE TIME YOU READ THIS I'LL BE GONE

A young woman becomes enmeshed in an increasingly complex mystery when her friend goes missing in their hometown of Cabot Cove, the fictional Maine location of Murder, She Wrote fame.

High school junior Bea is insightful, tenacious—and vulnerable. She has also always felt somewhat like a misfit. Besides being one of the few brown-skinned people in town—her dad is White, and her mom was Black and Mexican—she works for the crime website TrueMaine, writing about unsolved murders and spending her free time sleuthing. She attends a teen therapy group to help manage the anxiety she has experienced since her mother’s death when she was 11. When her friend Jackson disappears on the night he’s supposed to join her for one of the support group meetings, it comes as little surprise that she decides to investigate. A trio of teens from nearby elite boarding school Broadmoor Academy—Carlos plus siblings Leisl and Leif—both assist and complicate her investigative efforts. Readers will be quickly swept up in the historical cold case that seems to have laid the foundation for Jackson’s vanishing. Small-town secrets and scandals abound, and while the conclusion offers some degree of satisfying resolution, there is much that is left unexplained that can be addressed in the sequel.

A gripping thriller with a winning protagonist that sets the stage for more.