Summer Reading 2018: All Students

Damaged, Deceptive, Dangerous, Darling.When a group of teens wake up in the woods, these words are inked onto their skin. Are they labels? A warning? They must find the truth before a killer finds them.

A beautiful and distinguished family. A private island. A brilliant, damaged girl; a passionate, political boy. A group of four friends--the Liars--whose friendship turns destructive. A revolution. An accident. A secret. Lies upon lies. True love. The truth.  

Imagine you and your best friend head out West on a cross-country bike trek. Imagine that you get into a fight--the cheap friend won't kick in any cash--and you stop riding together. Imagine you reach Seattle, go home alone, and start college. Imagine you think your former best friend does too. Imagine he didn't, that he was carrying more than $20,000 in cash the whole trip, and that now the FBI is looking for him. Imagine your world shifting....

Sixteen-year-old Aza never intended to pursue the mystery of fugitive billionaire Russell Pickett, but there's a hundred-thousand-dollar reward at stake and her Best and Most Fearless Friend, Daisy, is eager to investigate. So together, they navigate the short distance and broad divides that separate them. A novel of love, resilience, and the power of lifelong friendship.

On Whidbey Island, the Gray quintuplets are the stuff of legend. Together, they serve as an unofficial search-and-rescue team for the island, saving tourists and locals alike from the forces of wind and sea. But, when a young boy goes missing, the mysteries start to pile up. While searching for him, they find his mother's dead body instead--and realize that something sinister is in their midst.

Jack's mom is gone, leaving him all alone on a campsite in Maine. Can he find his way back to Boston before the authorities realize what happened?

Mickey Bolitar's year can't get much worse. After witnessing his father's death and sending his mom to rehab, he's forced to live with his estranged uncle Myron and switch high schools. Fortunately, he's met a great girl, Ashley, and it seems like things might finally be improving. But then Ashley vanishes. Mickey follows Ashley's trail into a seedy underworld that reveals that Ashley isn't who she claimed to be. And neither was Mickey's father. Soon Mickey learns about a conspiracy so shocking that it leaves him questioning everything about the life he thought he knew.

Nick Pearson is hiding in plain sight. In fact, his name isn't really Nick Pearson. He shouldn't tell you his real name, his real hometown, or why his family just moved to Stepton, Virginia. And he definitely shouldn't tell you about his friend Eli Cruz and the major conspiracy Eli was uncovering when he died. About how Nick had to choose between solving Eli's murder with his hot sister, Reya, and "staying low-key" like the Program said to do. But he's going to tell you--unless he gets caught first. . . .

In 1915, Sherlock Holmes is retired and quietly engaged in the study of honeybees in Sussex when a young woman literally stumbles onto him on the Sussex Downs. Fifteen years old, gawky, egotistical, and recently orphaned, the young Mary Russell displays an intellect to impress even Sherlock Holmes. Under his reluctant tutelage, this very modern, twentieth-century woman proves a deft protégée and a fitting partner for the Victorian detective. They are soon called to Wales to help Scotland Yard find the kidnapped daughter of an American senator, a case of international significance with clues that dip deep into Holmes's past.

Someone murdered Brian's girfriend, Amanda. The police think it was her father. Brian isn't so sure. An innocent man couldn't be wrongly convicted, could he? But then Brian does a school project on Leo Frank, a Jewish man lynched decades ago for the murder of a teenage girl--a murder he didn't commit. Worse still, Brian's teammate Julius gets arrested for nothing more than being a black kid in the wrong place at the wrong time. As Amanda's father goes on trial, Brian admits to himself that he knows something that could break the case. But if he comes forward, will the real killer try for another perfect shot--this time against Brian?

When sixteen-year-old Tess Kendrick is sent to stay with her older sister, she has no idea that the famed Ivy Kendrick is the capital's number one "fixer." For powerful people looking to make a scandal disappear, Tess's sister is there to help . . . for a price. And no sooner does Tess enroll the prestigious Hardwicke School than she unwittingly finds herself following in Ivy's footsteps. Tess never thought she and Ivy had much in common, but when her new friends at school need help, she discovers that her talents quickly make her Hardwicke's go-to high-school fixer.

Sixteen-year-old Mattie Gokey has a word for everything, and big dreams but little hope of seeing them come true. She collects words and stores them up as a way of fending off the hard truths of her life.The fresh pain of her mother's death. The burden of raising her sisters while her father struggles over his brokeback farm. Desperate for money, she takes a job at the Glenmore, where hotel guest Grace Brown entrusts her with the task of burning a secret bundle of letters. But when Grace's drowned body is fished from Big Moose Lake, Mattie discovers that the letters could reveal the grim truth behind a murder.

In Bed Stuy, New York, a small misunderstanding can escalate into having a price on your head--even if you're totally clean. This gritty, triumphant debut that Publishers Weekly calls "a funny and rewarding read" captures the heart and the hardship of life for an urban teen.

All Imogene Scott knows of her mother is the bedtime story her father told her as a child. Now Imogene is seventeen, and her father, a famous author of medical mysteries, has struck out in the middle of the night and hasn’t come back. Neither Imogene’s stepmother nor the police know where he could’ve gone, but Imogene is convinced he’s looking for her mother. And she decides it’s up to her to track down a woman she’s only known in stories in order to find him and, perhaps, the answer to the question she’s carried with her for her entire life.

Dr Watson has been invited to Crain Manor, where his old friend James Crain is to hold a spiritualist gathering. During a séance a ghostly figure is seen, supposedly the spirit of Sybille, the first Lady Crain, who murdered her husband in the tower room, and whose appearance is said to be a sign of disaster. In an attempt to debunk the seance, James's sister Esther declares that she will sleep in the tower room - but at midnight there is a bloodcurdling scream and Esther is found dead, a look of horror on her face, and the room locked from the inside. Watson sends for Sherlock Holmes to investigate the tragic death. But it will be anything but straightforward, as there are those who do not want him to succeed...

Central to the plot is John Jasper: in public he is a man of integrity and benevolence; in private he is an opium addict. And while seeming to smile on the engagement of his nephew, Edwin Drood, he is, in fact, consumed by jealousy, driven to terrify the boy's fiance and to plot the murder of Edwin himself. As in many of Dickens's greatest novels, the gulf between appearance and reality drives the action.

He saw her wounded, and bleeding to death; saw her ashy countenance, and her wasting eyes ... turned piteously on himself, as if imploring him to save her from the fate that was dragging her to the grave... The novel, first published in 1797, remains a fascinating, engrossing and unnerving masterpiece of gothic fiction.

First published posthumously in 1817, "Northanger Abbey" was actually the first finished novel that Jane Austen wrote. It is the story of seventeen-year-old Catherine Morland, one of ten children of a country clergyman, who imagines life as living in one of the Gothic novels with which she is excessively fond of reading. The Tilneys invite Catherine to come stay with them at their estate, the titular Northanger Abbey. Catherine's naive over-active imagination quickly leads to embarrassment when she infers some sinister circumstances regarding the lack of emotion that General Tilney shows for the loss of his deceased wife. Eventually she realizes that real life is not at all like that of a Gothic novel.

The year is 1327. Franciscans in a wealthy Italian abbey are suspected of heresy, and Brother William of Baskerville arrives to investigate. When his delicate mission is suddenly overshadowed by seven bizarre deaths, Brother William turns detective. His tools are the logic of Aristotle, the theology of Aquinas, the empirical insights of Roger Bacon--all sharpened to a glistening edge by wry humor and a ferocious curiosity. He collects evidence, deciphers secret symbols and coded manuscripts, and digs into the eerie labyrinth of the abbey, where "the most interesting things happen at night."

Beloved detective Hercule Poirot embarks on a journey to Egypt in one of Agatha Christie's most famous mysteries, Death on the Nile. The tranquility of a cruise along the Nile was shattered by the discovery that Linnet Ridgeway had been shot through the head. She was young, stylish, and beautiful. A girl who had everything . . . until she lost her life. Hercule Poirot recalled an earlier outburst by a fellow passenger: "I'd like to put my dear little pistol against her head and just press the trigger." Yet in this exotic setting nothing is ever quite what it seems.

Shirley Jackson's beloved gothic tale of a peculiar girl named Merricat and her family's dark secret Taking readers deep into a labyrinth of dark neurosis, We Have Always Lived in the Castle is a deliciously unsettling novel about a perverse, isolated, and possibly murderous family and the struggle that ensues when a cousin arrives at their estate.

One of literature's most gripping ghost stories depicts the sinister transformation of 2 innocent children into flagrant liars and hypocrites. Elegantly told tale of unspoken horror and psychological terror creates a complete feeling of dread and uncertainty.

When Sir Charles Baskerville is found suspiciously dead, his friend, Dr. James Mortimer asks Sherlock Holmes to look into the death. While the cause of death is determined to be a heart attack, Mortimer suspects foul play and fears that Sir Charles’s nephew and sole heir, Sir Henry Baskerville, may be in danger next. At the center of the investigation is the curse of the Baskervilles, which dates back to the time of the English Civil War. Supposedly the family’s ancestor, Hugo Baskerville, sold his soul to the devil, and the family has been haunted by a large spectral hound ever since. The details of the case spark the interest of Sherlock and he agrees to take up the case.