Better Left Buried
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5.0 • 1 Rating
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- $10.99
Publisher Description
KNIVES OUT meets A GOOD GIRL'S GUIDE TO MURDER in Mary E. Roach's debut YA mystery Better Left Buried, in which two girls try to get to the bottom of a town full of secrets, a family full of mystery and an abandoned amusement park where people keep turning up dead.Lucy Preston just wants to go on vacation. But being the daughter of a famous private detective means that sometimes, your beach vacay goes off the rails a bit. Think: a clandestine meeting at an abandoned amusement park—except instead of a meeting, Lucy and her mom find a body. Because of course they do.As Lucy's mom is swept into top-secret detective stuff, Lucy sets out to investigate her mom's mysterious connection with this town. Lucy's snooping sets her on a collision course with Audrey Nelson, the mysterious girl on the motorcycle who was there the night they found the body. Lucy has questions, and Audrey has answers, but there's this tiny problem: Lucy's mom is investigating Audrey's mom . . . for murder.Everyone has something to hide, and if Lucy and Audrey can't work together to uncover secrets that go back generations, there will likely be another body found at the base of the old roller coaster. And this time it might just be Lucy's.Alternating between Lucy and Audrey's point of view, and filled with suspense as secrets are spilled, Better Left Buried is sure to leave readers on the edge of their seats until the very last page.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Roach explores class differences and unbalanced power dynamics in this expertly paced debut thriller. Gay 16-year-old Lucille Preston knows almost nothing about her private investigator mother. So, when her mother is called by a mysterious Pierce Anselm, it's the first time Lucy has ever seen her cool composure crack; the pair's discovery of Pierce's corpse at the base of a roller coaster shatters it. While uncovering her mother's history with the Anselms—a wealthy family of amusement park tycoons—Lucy becomes entangled with teen Audrey Nelson, also gay, who was at the scene of the crime. As Audrey endeavors to clear her name of Pierce's death and Lucy digs up more of her mother's past, it soon becomes clear that the danger is far from over. Whether it's revenge or a cover-up they're after, the Anselms will stop at nothing to achieve it. Roach's profound prose teems with strong depictions of character relationships—including an opposites-attract sapphic romance and multiple mother-daughter bonds—set against the moody backdrop of an abandoned amusement park. Lucy describes her mother's skin as a "soft brown" while hers is "as pale as my dad's"; Audrey reads as white. Ages 12–up.
