The Amateurs

Description

When Aerin Kelly was eleven, she idolised her seventeen-year-old sister, Helena, and they did everything together. They made Claymation movies and posted them to YouTube. They made fun of Windmere-Carruthers, the private school they attended, they invented new flavours for their parents' organic ice cream shop, and they dressed up their golden retriever, Buster. But when Helena went into senior year things started to change. Rather than being Aerin's inseparable sister, she started to push her away. Then, on a snowy winter's day, Helena vanished. Four years later, Helena's body is found. Wracked with grief and refusing to give up on her sister, Aerin spends months trying to figure out what exactly happened to Helena and who killed her. But the police have no leads. A young, familiar officer named Thomas wants to help and suggests she checks out a website called Case Not Closed. Hesitantly, she posts, and when teenagers Seneca and Maddox show up on her doorstep offering to help investigate she accepts in desperation. Both have suffered their own losses and also posted to the site with no luck, so they are hoping this case might be the one they crack. But as their investigation begins, it seems that maybe it's no accident that they are all together, and that maybe the crimes have something - or someone - in common.

For as long as she can remember, Sara Shepard has been writing. However, when she was young she also wanted to be a soap opera star, a designer for LEGO, a filmmaker, a claymation artist, a geneticist, and a fashion magazine editor when she grew up. She and her sister have been creating joint artistic and written projects for years, except they're pretty sure they're the only ones who find them funny. She got her MFA at Brooklyn College and now lives in Pittsburgh, PA with her husband and two children. Sara Shepard is the author of two New York Times bestselling series, Pretty Little Liars and The Lying Game, as well as the series The Perfectionists. Visit her at www.saracshepard.com and follow her on Twitter and Snapchat at @sarabooks and on Instagram at saracshepard.

A clever, well-structured mystery -- Kimberley McCreight, New York Times Best-Selling Author of 'The Outliers' Fast-paced action, humour and romance -- Katharine McGee, author of 'The Thousandth Floor' Devious and thrilling -- Kass Morgan, New York Times Best-Selling author of 'The 100' High stakes, high-octane, compulsively readable suspense -- Kami Garcia, New York Times Best-Selling Coauthor of 'Beautiful Creatures' A classic whodunit with a contemporary edge -- Cecily Von Ziegesar, New York Times Best-Selling Author of 'The Gossip Girl' A dark and twisty thriller which might just fill the Pretty Little Liars-shaped hole in my heart -- Danielle Paige, New York Times Best-Selling Author of 'Dorothy Must Die' A delicious and suspenseful page-turner -- I. Marlene King, Executive Producer, Pretty Little Liars This is a gloriously twisty who-dunnit (...) the ending was a stroke of pure genius and was brilliant because I never saw it coming. The Amateurs was a super read and I'm thrilled that there will be another instalment in the series next year. There's no doubt that I will be lining up to get my hands on it * A Dream of Books * Shepard weaves a clever web of suspicion and intrigue. I made several guesses as the book progresses - all very wide of the mark - but there's never any sense of being deliberately led up the garden path. The characters grew on me as more about them and their motivations is revealed. The final reveal was as shocking as it was unexpected. * Crime Review *