What Happened on Hicks Road

When 17-year-old new girl Lennox Oliver turns her car onto Hicks Road in San Jose, she ignores her friends’ claims that it’s haunted, until a frightened, unknown blond girl suddenly appears in the middle of the road. Lennox knows she hit the stranger—she felt the thump, and there’s a dent in the front of her car—but she doesn’t find a body, and her passengers deny having seen anything unusual. As her peers go about their lives, Lennox is preoccupied with the mystery of her assumed hit-and-run. Could it have been a deer? Or a hallucination brought about by hereditary schizophrenia, for which her mother has been hospitalized since Lennox was nine? A blissful distraction arises in the form of a fledgling romance with popular senior class president Owen Rossum. But as more clues emerge surrounding the incident on Hicks Road, the more confused Lennox becomes. If the resolution is a little uneven, quick pacing, wry prose, and abundant flashbacks that flesh out Lennox’s history with her mother and her mental health balance out this climactic thriller by Jayne (The Girl in the Headlines). Main characters read as white. Ages 14–up. Agent: Amberly Finarelli, Andrea Hurst Literary. (Aug.)