Deadly Animals — Marie Tierney

Finding a dead body is not normal. But Ava is not a normal teenager. In this chilling debut mystery, only the obsessive spirit of youth can save a sleepy town from the savagery within.

Fourteen-year-old Ava Bonney is unlike other children. She has an obsessive interest in the rate at which dead animals decompose. The motorway she lives by regularly offers up roadkill, and in the dead of night, Ava likes nothing more than to pull her latest discovery into her roadside den and record her findings.

One night, she stumbles across the body of her classmate Mickey Grant, and fearing that her secret ritual could be revealed, she makes an anonymous call to the police. When Detective Seth Delahaye is given the case, Ava won't step back â€" not when teenagers in her sleepy South Birmingham town are going missing.

How hard can it be to track a killer?

Marie Tierney's debut, Deadly Animals, is a beautiful novel about a small community's descent into devastation and desperation â€" and the bravery of youth in the face of darkness.