False Awakening

Ask anyone in Davenport, Connecticut about Flicker Island and watch what happens to their face.

They will agree it is out there, somewhere east past Whisper Rock. They will tell you there is nothing special about it, just an island, they are all over New England. Their eyes will go glassy while they say it. Then the subject will change, and not one person in the room will notice that it did. Mia Burke's own parents do it at their own dinner table, and her mother is the town doctor, a woman who forgets nothing.

Mia is sixteen and has finally been handed the school paper after a year of running it for somebody else. All she has ever wanted is one real story, and the island is the one story in this town that nobody will let her have. Then Tegan Hathaway's body is found in the woods a few miles out of town, and Davenport has its first murder.

Tegan's brother Micah does not ask Mia to catch anyone. He asks her to find out who his sister had become, and what she had been hiding, because it turns out he never knew.

And every answer she turns up leads back out to the island, an island her father's nautical charts do not show and the two new students will not discuss. Somebody in Davenport would very much like her to stop asking.