First published 2026
Raina volunteers for Night Walk at Ellison College, escorting students safely across campus. She walks a fellow freshman to her dorm one Halloween week evening, but the girl vanishes before reaching her door. Raina teams up with the missing student's stepbrother to search for answers. They discover the girl had been researching the Mischief Girls case from thirty years earlier, when three students entered the woods around campus and only one returned alive. The old murders were never solved. As Raina digs deeper, tracking leads from faculty offices to prison cells, the two cases begin to merge. The current disappearance may not have started the night the girl went missing. The roots might stretch back three decades to whatever happened in those woods. Raina must confront both mysteries to find the truth, even as the investigation forces her to face her own personal struggles.
Genres: mystery, contemporary, thriller, young-adult, dark-academia
Vibes: atmospheric, dark, gripping, mysterious, suspenseful
Tropes: amateur-sleuth, dual-timeline, found-family, personal-growth
Setting: Ellison College, Campus Woods
Period: Present Day, Thirty Years Earlier
352 pages · Hardcover · Delacorte Press
Content warnings: death, murder