Dead to Me

Gr 9 Up—Sixteen-year-old Alice imagines herself to be as good a private eye as Sam Spade or Philip Marlowe from the 1940s film noir classics. Like the Maltese Falcon and other detective films, Alice is surrounded by flawed and compromised characters, including her parents, the LAPD, and other young people involved in crime. The book opens with Alice finding her estranged sister, Annie, in a coma. She makes it her business to find the perpetrators of this crime, delving into Annie's dark past and her association with Conrad Donoghue, a devastingly handsome leading man with secrets of his own. Alice is helped and hindered by corrupt police, undercover agents, witnesses, and friends of Annie. Readers may have difficulty remembering so many characters without a scorecard. Plot twists and turns that might have made sense in a film are harder to follow in this medium. Even after solving the crime, everyone connected to this story emerges tarnished, including Alice. For fans of melodrama and mystery.—Lillian Hecker, Town of Pelham Public Library, NY