The Roanoke Girls

YA author Engel (The Book of Ivy) makes her adult debut with a gripping if creepy thriller set on the Kansas prairie. Lane Roanoke fervently hoped she had seen the last of Roanoke, the family homestead, when she fled Kansas for Los Angeles as a desperate 16-year-old, but now a decade later the disappearance of her cousin Allegra, the only kin to whom she feels a connection, compels her to return against her better judgment. Indeed, with local law enforcement stymied, it seems that the only hope of solving the mystery lies with Lane and whatever clues she can dredge up from memories of the traumatic summer the two cousins shared as teens. Skipping lightly between past and present, including Lane’s efforts to finally come to terms with the two most influential men in her life—dangerously seductive family patriarch Yates and roguish Cooper Sullivan, her never-forgotten first love—this gothic page-turner speeds inexorably toward the kinds of devastating revelations readers won’t soon forget. Agent: Jodi Reamer, Writers House. (Mar.)