Deadly Animals
A Novel
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4.2 • 24 Ratings
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
WINNER OF THE INTERNATIONAL THRILLER WRITERS AWARD FOR BEST FIRST NOVEL
WINNER OF THE MCDERMID DEBUT AWARD FOR CRIME FICTION
Finding a dead body is not normal. But Ava is not a normal teenager. In this chillingly beautiful mystery, only the obsessive spirit of youth can save a desperate town from the savagery within.
Ava Bonney is a compassionate and studious fourteen-year-old girl with a dark secret: She has an obsessive interest in the macabre and is fascinated by how dead animals decompose. The highway she lives by regularly offers up gifts of roadkill, and in the dead of night Ava loves nothing more than to pull her latest discovery into her roadside den and record her findings.
One night, she stumbles across the body of her classmate. Fearing that her secret ritual could be revealed, she makes an anonymous call to the police. But even when local detectives take over the case, Ava won’t step back—not while teenagers continue to go missing.
Racing alongside the police or against them, Ava is determined to figure out who is hunting her classmates before she becomes the next prey.
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
Prepare to be creeped out in the best way possible by a debut novel that’s part period murder mystery and part horror story. Ava Bonney is a morbid 14-year-old in 1981 South Birmingham, England, with a weird passion for DIY forensic studies on dead animals. She’s also a precocious, supersmart badass who’s like a one-person crime lab. During her nocturnal roadkill hunts, she discovers that a boy she knows has been savagely murdered. She clues in homicide detective Seth Delahaye but does her own digging even after he’s on the case. Long story short: Kids might be getting killed by something like a werewolf. You’ll need a strong stomach for the grislier bits, but author Marie Tierney keeps the intensity up with every page. A Birmingham native, she gets the Thatcher-era working-class vibe just right—Ava’s world is inhabited not only by corpses and danger but by punk bands, studded belts, and Top of the Pops. Tierney gives us a Winona-in-Beetlejuice-worthy protagonist we can’t help but love. Deadly Animals is a treat for any time you need a scare you can sink your teeth into.
