This electric cross-country thriller follows the game of cat and mouse between a girl on the run from a murder she witnessed—or committed?—and the boy who’s sent to kill her.
Nicolette Holland is the girl everyone likes. Up for adventure. Loyal to a fault. And she’s pretty sure she can get away with anything...until a young woman is brutally murdered in the woods near Nicolette’s house. Which is why she has to disappear.
Jack Manx has always been the stand-up guy with the killer last name. But straight A’s and athletic trophies can’t make people forget that his father was a hit man and his brother is doing time for armed assault. Just when Jack is about to graduate from his Las Vegas high school and head east for college, his brother pulls him into the family business with inescapable instructions: find this ruthless Nicolette Holland and get rid of her. Or else Jack and everyone he loves will pay the price.
As Nicolette and Jack race to outsmart each other, tensions—and attractions—run high. Told in alternating voices, this tightly plotted mystery and tense love story challenges our assumptions about right and wrong, guilt and innocence, truth and lies.
Ann Redisch Stampler is the author of the young adult novels Afterparty and Where It Began as well as half a dozen picture books. Her work has garnered an Aesop accolade, the National Jewish Book Award, Sydney Taylor honors, the Middle East Book Award, and Bank Street Best Books of the Year mentions. She lives in Los Angeles, California, with her husband, Rick.
Read an Excerpt
How to Disappear I’m not Catherine Davis.
My hair isn’t brown.
And I have never lived in Tulsa, Oklahoma. I’ve never even seen the state of Oklahoma, despite what this convincing but completely fake ID says.
Or, technically, not fake.
Just not mine.
Cat Davis.
Born in Oklahoma City (where I wasn’t born).
Got so drunk, she didn’t even notice when her license was stolen right out of her bag nineteen years later. At a frat party (where I shouldn’t have been) in Galkey, Texas (where I didn’t want to be).
Stolen by me.
Morally speaking, this wasn’t my most glittering moment. But it definitely answered that Sunday School question of whether I’d steal bread if it would keep me from starving.
Yes.
I would.
The license just seemed like one more untrue thing to stuff between me and my past. A tiny piece of laminated plastic I actually thought of as my ticket out of the obituary column.
One more little thing I needed to make it to the age of seventeen alive.
That, and a different-looking face and a different-shaped body and bulletproof skin.
Car Chases. Mistaken Identity. Kidnapping. Murder. There’s no limit to how far YA thrillers can and will go, and that’s what makes them so damn awesome. When you combine reckless and desperate teens with some bad behavior and no curfew, there’s no telling what can happen… Well, I supposed I could tell you what can happen, but […]
Much has been written about absentee, oblivious, or dead parents in YA lit. But what about the parents who are flat-out criminal? I’m talking serial killers, mobsters, con artists, thieves, and general psychopaths. What’s it like to grow up in a house where Mom and Dad are villains? For starters, the angst factor is beyond the norm and legit terrifying, […]
