Pretty Dead Queens - Hardcover

Donne, Alexa

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0593479823 ISBN 13: 9780593479827

Verlag: Crown Books for Young Readers, 2022

Inhaltsangabe

The new homecoming queen is dead . . . and she's not the first unsolved murder at Seaview High. From the critically acclaimed author of The Ivies comes a nonstop YA thriller about a decades-old mystery, a copycat killer, and the teen who will stop at nothing to uncover the truth.

"Utterly savage." –Jessica Goodman, New York Times bestselling author of They’ll Never Catch Us

"Hand this fast-paced thriller filled with plenty of twists and drama to fans of Holly Jackson or Karen M. McManus." -SLJ

A 2023 Edgar Award Nominee!

After the death of her mom (screw cancer), seventeen-year-old Cecelia Ellis goes to live with her estranged grandmother, a celebrated author whose Victorian mansion is as creepy as the murder mysteries she writes. On the surface, life is utterly ordinary in the California coastal town . . . until the homecoming queen is murdered. And she’s not Seaview’s first pretty dead queen.

With a copycat killer on the loose, Cecelia throws herself into the investigation, determined to crack the case like the heroines in her grandmother’s books. But the more Cecelia digs into the town’s secrets, the more she worries that her own mystery might not have a storybook ending.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Alexa Donne is the Edgar Award–nominated author of Pretty Dead Queens, The Ivies, and The Bitter End. By day she lives in Los Angeles and works in television marketing. The rest of the time she contemplates creative motives for murder and takes too many pictures of her cats.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

CHAPTER ONE

 

Some people attract death.

When I was nine, my pet rabbit, Easter, flopped out of my arms while Mom was cleaning her cage, and my bunny’s back snapped in two. The fall didn’t kill Easter, but we had to take her to the vet to put her down. I didn’t cry.

When I was six, Granddad went to the angels. That’s how my grandmother put it. Mom had a more literal take. “He’s dead!” she screamed at her mother. Wailed. It was the first time I ever saw my mom cry.

Then there was our dog, five years ago. My chemistry teacher, who was felled by an aneurysm when I was in ninth grade. The pretty junior girl my sophomore year, DOA in a horrific highway crash.

I am just shy of my eighteenth birthday and on my sixth funeral.

It’s the worst kind of funeral that brings me to Seaview and my grandmother’s creepy-as-hell Victorian mansion off Main Street. (Yeah, this place has a Main Street.) The peeling velvet wallpaper is straight from a Poe story.

“It’s original hardwood!” my grandmother says. “People shit themselves for floors like mine!” She sweeps across said floors, which surely hide long-desiccated corpses, without hesitation. I pause at the threshold, the porch creaking beneath my feet. If I step over, follow this strange yet eerily familiar woman inside, it will be real. I will live here now.

But I don’t exactly have a choice. Everything I own has been packed up, sold off, or put in storage. It’s this or foster care. Maura Weston is the only family I have left. Even if I barely know her, legally she’s my guardian. This is my home.

My mom is dead, and I’m living with a stranger.

I step through the doorway. Look up the grand staircase to the landing, where Mrs. Danvers is surely waiting. But it’s only Maura and me in this cavernous Victorian relic.

“Call me Grandma,” she’d said on the drive from the airport. “My fans call me Maura. You’re not a fan, are you, dear?”

It seemed like a trick question.

“I read the one set on the boat,” I’d said, and it appeared to please her.

“That was a New York Times bestseller,” she said, beaming.

A lot of them are New York Times bestsellers.

“You’ll be on the fourth floor,” she tells me now. “You have your own bathroom, so lots of privacy. Plus, you have those gloriously young knees, for all those stairs. Suzanne’s in the carriage house out back. You’ll meet her in the morning.”

She mentioned in the car that her assistant, Suzanne, was supposed to pick me up but there was a last-minute change in plans. I can’t tell whether Maura is annoyed by the inconvenience. It’s late, eleven o’clock, because Seaview is on the ass end of nowhere. Northern California: where, with layovers, it can take you four hours to fly from one regional airport to another and then you still have to drive two hours to your destination. But her expression remained in a pleasant-grandma mask. A brave face for the orphaned grandchild. Warm hugs and sad smiles.

“You’ll want to get to bed, since you have school in the morning. I’ll take you to get registered. Eight o’clock sharpish. They’re expecting you.”

It’s early October, so school has already started. I’ll be the strange new kid with the dead mom, moving in with the town’s most famous resident, and six weeks of work to catch up on, because death does not time itself conveniently to school schedules. Not to mention the lifetime of friendships I’ll never edge in on. Kids in towns like these are born here, die here. Relationships go from womb to tomb. My mom hated it. People were always coming and going when we lived in LA. Easy to be anonymous.

I lug my suitcase behind me, the tired wheels scuffing against honeyed hardwood until I reach the foot of the grand staircase. I brace myself to heft my bag--my entire life somehow reduced to a single suitcase--all the way up.

“I think that will fit in the dumbwaiter,” Maura says, backlit by the warm hallway light, haloed like an angel. Silver hair, peppered with the barest wisps of deep brown, cut short, ear-length, and flipping out at the edges. Big brown eyes with lids smudged smoky gray. Brows overplucked, the vestiges of a vintage trend. An old woman reflecting the heyday of her youth.

I search for my mother’s face in hers. Try to imagine Mom if she’d been allowed to reach old age. Pointed chin, yes. Maybe the cheekbones. The turn of her mouth. Not the eyes, though. Mom’s were deeper set. She’d have killed to pull off that eye shadow, or a delicate wing, like I can.

“You got that gorgeous wavy hair from me. You’re welcome. But those eyes . . . must be your father’s,” Maura says, apparently taking me in as well. “You’re lucky. Such a pretty color.”

Green, like the phantom man my mother wouldn’t talk about. It was one of the few sore points between us. My father is a ghost. My mother, now ashes. My grandmother, a stranger. But she’s agreed to take me in, and she’s sweet enough. And very rich. This old mansion is nine times the size of the apartment Mom and I rented in Pasadena.

“It’s this way.” She tilts her head toward the kitchen, leads me back. It’s an HGTV fantasy land. Old mixed with new. A showstopping cast-iron stove alongside state-of-the-art appliances, an updated subway-tile backsplash and farmhouse sink, a sprawling kitchen island with barstools lined up like soldiers, and original wood cabinetry. And to the right as we come in, nestled at the very edge of a back stairwell, an unassuming cupboard door. Maura undoes the latch, swings the door wide. An extralarge dumbwaiter.

“We removed the shelves decades ago for this very purpose. Give it a try with your bag,” she says.

It takes the both of us to haul it inside. The bag barely fits, and the bottom of the miniature elevator shudders under the weight. Maura seems nonplussed.

“My mother’s tea service weighed more than this, surely. The bitch of it will be your having to haul it from the third to the fourth floor. I’m not cut out for that anymore. I’m a firm sixty-eight--but not that firm.” She winks. It’s strange hearing the word bitch out of someone so old, but she’s already graced me with a creative array of curses in the car. It seems I have a cool grandma.

“Let’s go,” she says, halfway up the back stairs. The servants’ stairs, they would have been, way back. I wonder when they stopped having live-in servants here, but then I remember Suzanne. Maura explained to me that she used to be her assistant when she lived in New York, and she couldn’t function without her, so when she moved back to Seaview permanently, she set Suzanne up in the guesthouse in the backyard. Maura assured me she pays her a handsome salary to live in the middle of nowhere. I wonder if Suzanne has as rosy a view of the arrangement.

“This is where I leave you,” Maura says on the first landing. I peer around the bend, spying a spacious bedroom at the end of the hall. “It’s good to have you here, Cecelia, even if the circumstances are . . . well.” She sighs. Sniffs. Dabs at her eyes, shiny with tears. “My poor baby girl, Vanessa. Parents shouldn’t outlive their children,” she says, more to herself than to me, I think.

“If only you’d called me,” she continues. “I hate that you were alone at the end. That she didn’t have her mother....

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Crown Books for Young Readers
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2022
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0593479823
• ISBN 13: 9780593479827
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Anzahl der Seiten: 336
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
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