Awards-

• Teen's Top Ten
  Young Adult Library Services Association

Excerpts-

• From the cover ONE
  
  Here and not. Red and black. One moment there, another gone. Her face in the glass. Disappearing in the light of oncoming headlights, reappearing in the dark of outside. Gone again. The window kept her face for its own. Good, it could keep it. Back, the window didn’t want it either.
  
  Red’s reflection stared through her, but the glass and the darkness didn’t get her quite right, blurring the details. The main features were there: the too-­pale glow of her skin and the wide-­set dark blue eyes that weren’t hers alone. You look so much alike, she used to hear, more than she cared to. Now she didn’t care to hear it at all, even think it. So, she looked away from her face, their face, ignoring them both. But it was harder to ignore something when you were trying.
  
  Red shifted her gaze, looking instead at the cars in the lane beside and below. Something wasn’t right; the cars seemed too small from up here at her window, but Red didn’t feel any bigger. She watched a blue sedan edging forward to pass, and she helped it along with her eyes, pushing them ahead. There you go, bud. Ahead of this thirty-­one-­foot-­long metal can, speeding down the highway. Which was strange when you thought about it; that you traveled down a highway when high was right there in the name.
  
  “Red?” The voice opposite interrupted her thoughts of lowways and highways. Maddy was looking at her through the dimmed inside lights, skin screwed up around her sandy-­brown eyes. She gave a small kick under the table, jabbing Red in the shin. “Did you just forget we were in the middle of playing a game?”
  
  “No,” Red said, but yes, yes she had. What had they been playing again?
  
  “Twenty Questions,” Maddy said, reading Red’s mind. Well, they had known each other all their lives; Red had only gotten a seven-­month head start and she hadn’t done a lot with it. Maybe Maddy had learned to read her mind in all that time, more than seventeen years. Red really hoped not. There were things in there no one else could ever see. No one. Not even Maddy. Especially not Maddy.
  
  “Yeah, I know,” Red said, her eyes wandering to the other side of the RV, to the outside door and the sofa bed—­currently sofa—­where she and Maddy would sleep tonight. Red couldn’t remember; which side of the bed did Maddy like again? Because she couldn’t sleep if she wasn’t on the left side, and just as she was trying to read Maddy’s mind back about that, her eyes caught on a green sign outside in the night, flying over the windshield.
  
  “That sign says Rockingham, aren’t we getting off this road soon?” Red said, not loud enough for anyone at the very front of the RV to hear, where it would have been more use. She was probably wrong, anyway, best to say nothing. They’d been driving on this same road for the past hour, I-­73 becoming I-­74 and then US 220 without much fanfare.
  
  “Red Kenny, focus.” Maddy snapped her fingers, a hint of a smile on her face. It never creased, though, Maddy’s face, not even with the widest of smiles. Skin like cream, soft and clearer than it had any business being. It made the freckles on Red’s face stand out even more, side by side in photos. Literally side by side; they were almost the exact same height, down to the highest-­standing hair, though Red’s was dark blond where Maddy’s was more light brown, a shade or two separating them. Red always had hers tied back, loose...

About the Author-

• Random House Children’s Books is a division of Penguin Random House.

Reviews-

• 

  October 17, 2022
  Six Philadelphia teenagers’ spring break road trip turns deadly after they get lost in South Carolina in this nail-biting thriller from Jackson (the Good Girls’ Guide to Murder series). Redford “Red” Kenny and her friends—siblings Oliver and Maddie Lavoy, Oliver’s girlfriend Reyna Flores-Serrano, Arthur Moore, and Simon Yoo—borrow Simon’s uncle’s RV to road-trip down to Gulf Shores for spring break. The journey is pleasant, if cramped, and the teens pass the time playing card games and drinking. While navigating without cell service to an isolated rural rest stop, they make a wrong turn onto McNair Cemetery Road, where one of their tires blows out. The group is then taken hostage by an unseen sniper, who shoots out the rest of the tires, the gas tank, and a window. Via a walkie-talkie left behind by the perpetrator, the shooter claims that one of them has a secret he wants revealed and warns that “if you try to run, I will shoot.” Hints of romance and a hopeful resolution help buoy unrelenting violent action, a tense atmosphere, and a melancholic tone. Reyna is Mexican; Simon’s father is Korean; the rest of the cast present as white. Ages 14–up. Agent: Sam Copeland, RCW Literary.

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