As Spooky Season comes upon us, we have three new thrillers to add to our list. Let’s hope these three books get our hearts pumping and get our scary on.
The House of Gardenias by Isabel Cañas
Dutton Books for Young Readers
Growing up in a city wracked by political violence and a home where she’s more likely to receive a beating than a meal, Minerva Treviño’s cowardice has kept her alive for sixteen years. But even she has a limit. Hungry and desperate, she musters enough courage to run away and take a job as lady’s maid to a wealthy widow who supports the deposed viceroy.
Minerva is happy serving Encarnación del Valle. She has food in her belly and the safety of a warm house lit by magical chispa. Why should she care who runs the country or how her employer affords the magic?
When the viceroy sweeps back into power, Minerva retreats with her gleeful employer to the family’s mountainside stronghold to wait out the inevitable rebel slaughter. At la Casa de las Gardenias, Minerva faces new threats in the haughty servants and cruel, scheming del Valles.
But the living residents of the house are the least of her worries. As Minerva quickly discovers, the ancient estate is home to forces far older and more bloodthirsty than anything she could have imagined.
The Siren by Tomi Adeyemi
Henry Holt and Co. (BYR)
Nothing is more intoxicating than power. . .
When Emery steps foot onto Dartmouth’s campus, she knows what she has to do: keep her scholarship, take her meds, and pray no one ever finds out about the past she left behind.
But that all changes when Emery meets an intoxicating girl named Roux, her disarming stepbrother named Eli, and the mystical band of girls Roux calls “The Sirens.” Each Siren is as beautiful as the last, and their lives on campus are shrouded in extravagance and secret parties. Before the girls became Sirens, they were outcasts, yet under Roux, their wildest dreams come true. When Roux offers Emery the chance to join them, Emery will do whatever it takes to make it in.
Even if it costs Emery her life.
Mischief Girls #1 by Aashna Avachat
Delacorte Press
Every school has its secrets.
Ellison College freshman Raina has no idea that her new school is hiding such a grisly past. But thirty years ago, on Mischief Night the week after Halloween, three students walked into the woods surrounding campus, and only one came out. Their killer was never caught, and the students became known as the Mischief Girls.
No one knows what happened. Or do they?
Three decades later, Anika, a classmate of Raina’s, has gone missing. Turns out Anika was looking into the Mischief Girls’ murders before she vanished. And Raina may have been the last person to see her.
Old lies die the hardest.
With the help of Anika’s stepbrother, Rohan, Raina begins to dig into the truth. But the deeper she goes, the more she starts to wonder whether what happened to Anika really began the night she disappeared…or if it goes back further.
The past is catching up to Ellison College. And maybe, so is a killer…