Reality Check

Author: Abrahams, Peter
Format: Hardcover
Type: Teen Mystery Novel
Page Count: 336pp.
Pub. Date: April 2009
Publisher: HarperCollins Children’s Books/HarperTeen

Nominated for the 2010 Edgar Award for Best Young Adult

QB of the varsity football team. Passing grades in all his classes. Dating the hottest — and smartest — girl at school. Summer job paying more than minimum wage.

Things in Cody’s world seem to be going pretty well. Until, that is, his girlfriend, Clea, is sent off to boarding school across the country, and a torn ACL ends his high school football career. But bad things come in threes — or in Cody’s case, sixes and twelves — and the worst is yet to come.

While limping through town one day, Cody sees a newspaper heading: “Local Girl Missing.” Clea, now his ex, has disappeared from her boarding school in Vermont, and the only clue is a letter she sent to Cody the morning of her disappearance. With that as his guide, Cody sets out to find out what happened. Once in Vermont, he unearths the town’s secrets — and finds out that football isn’t the only thing he’s good at.

Reality Check is another edge-of-your-seat suspense novel by the New York Times bestselling and Edgar Award-nominated author of Down the Rabbit Hole.

If the Witness Lied

Author: Cooney, Caroline B.
Format: Hardcover
Type: Teen Mystery Novel
Page Count: 224pp.
Pub. Date: May 2009
Publisher: Random House Children’s Books/Delacorte Press

Nominated for the 2010 Edgar Award for Best Young Adult

Choices do matter and forgiveness is possible.

Jack Fountain knows that what’s happened to his family sounds like the most horrible soap opera anyone could ever write. But it happened — to Jack; his parents; his sisters, Smithy and Madison. And to his baby brother, Tris. What made it worse was that the media wanted to know every detail.

Now it’s almost Tris’s third birthday, and everything’s starting again. Aunt Cheryl, who’s living with the Fountain children now that their parents are gone, has decided that they will heal only if they work through their pain — on camera. The very identities they’ve created for themselves are called into question. In less than twenty-four hours their fate will change yet again, but this time they vow to not be exploited and to discover the truth.

In this gripping thriller, Caroline B. Cooney details how love, devotion, and forgiveness make resilience — and recovery — possible.

The Morgue and Me

Author: Ford, John C.
Format: Hardcover
Type: Teen Mystery Novel
Page Count: 288pp.
Pub. Date: June 2009
Publisher: Penguin Young Readers Group/Viking Children’s Books

Nominated for the 2010 Edgar Award for Best Young Adult

Christopher just needed a job to kill time the summer after high school graduation.

He didn’t expect it to be in the morgue. Or that he would accidentally discover a murder cover-up. Or that his discovery would lead him to a full-blown investigation involving bribery, kidnappings, more murders . . . and his best friend. And he certainly could never have predicted that Tina — loud, insanely hot, ambitious newspaper reporter Tina — would be his partner. But all of that did happen.

And Christopher’s life will never be the same.

With plenty of plot twists, red herrings, and dry wit, The Morgue and Me is a page-turning modern take on the classic detective genre.

Petronella Saves Nearly Everyone: The Entomological Tales of Augustus T. Percival

Author: Low, Dene
Illustrator: Jen Corace
Format: Hardcover
Type: Teen Mystery Novel
Page Count: 208pp.
Pub. Date: June 2009
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Children’s Books

Nominated for the 2010 Edgar Award for Best Young Adult

You would think Petronella’s sixteenth birthday would be cause for celebration.

After all, fashionable friends are arriving at her country estate near London, teas are being served, and her coming out party promises to be a resplendent affair. Everything is falling nicely into place, until, suddenly — it isn’t.

For Petronella discovers that her guardian, Uncle Augustus T. Percival, has developed a most unVictorian compulsion: He must eat bugs. Worse still, because he is her guardian, Uncle Augustus is to attend her soiree and his current state will most definitely be an embarrassment.

During the festivities, when Petronella would much rather be sharing pleasantries with handsome Lord James Sinclair (swoon), important guests are disappearing, kidnapping notes are appearing, many of the clues are insects, and Uncle Augustus is surreptitiously devouring evidence.

It’s more than one sixteen-year-old girl should have to deal with. But, truth be told, there is far more yet to come . . .

Shadowed Summer

Author: Mitchell, Saundra
Format: Hardcover
Type: Teen Mystery Novel
Page Count: 192pp.
Pub. Date: February 2009
Publisher: Random House Children’s Books/Delacorte Press

Nominated for the 2010 Edgar Award for Best Young Adult

Iris is ready for another hot, routine summer in her small Louisiana town, hanging around the Red Stripe grocery with her best friend, Collette, and traipsing through the cemetery telling each other spooky stories and pretending to cast spells.

Except this summer, Iris doesn’t have to make up a story.

This summer, one falls right in her lap.

Years ago, before Iris was born, a local boy named Elijah Landry disappeared. All that remained of him were whispers and hushed gossip in the church pews. Until this summer. A ghost begins to haunt Iris, and she’s certain it’s the ghost of Elijah.

What really happened to him?

And why, of all people, has he chosen Iris to come back to?