First published 2019
Dee Guerrera is seventeen years old and already condemned. She wakes up on the floor of a dark warehouse on Alcatraz 2.0, a prison island that has been rebuilt into a kind of suburban nightmare where convicted killers are hunted and executed live on a streaming app called The Postman. The audience watches from home, cheering or jeering. Dee is supposed to be next. She was convicted of murdering her stepsister, but she didn't do it. With executioners already moving through the island and the death count climbing, Dee links up with a group of other inmates she starts calling the Death Row Breakfast Club. Together they try to stay alive long enough to expose the truth. The app wants a show. The crowd wants blood. Dee wants out. Gretchen McNeil's #Murdertrending is set in a near future where public execution has become entertainment, and the line between justice and spectacle has disappeared entirely. The real question the book keeps pushing is a simple one: what happens when the system that is supposed to protect you decides you make better content dead?
Genres: science-fiction, dystopia, mystery, thriller, young-adult, 21st-century
Vibes: dark, fast-paced, gritty, intense, suspenseful, thought-provoking
Tropes: found-family, survival, systemic-corruption, wrongly-accused
Setting: Alcatraz 2.0
Period: near future
368 pages · Paperback · Disney Hyperion
Content warnings: death, murder, violence