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Reviewed by:
  • Dead Girl Moon
  • Elizabeth Bush
Price, Charlie. Dead Girl Moon. Farrar, 2012. [272p]. ISBN 978-0-374-31752-2 $17.99 Reviewed from galleys R Gr. 9–12.

Three teenage newcomers arrive in the town of Portage, Montana hoping to find some needed respite. Orphaned JJ, who winds up in the trailer of her alcoholic aunt, just wants to fit in at high school. Mick, on the lam with his thieving father, would like to evade the police long enough to complete high school, make some [End Page 212] friends, and play on a team. Grace, fleeing from her sexually abusive brothers, wants to lay low long enough to make some cash and count the months until she reaches the age of majority. At first Portage seems like a modest answer to their modest dreams; the town is little more than a remote dot on the map, and the town fathers seem to be able to produce part-time work for any teen willing to put in after-school hours. Money-hungry Grace is the first to catch the scent of corruption as her new employers enlist her help in a couple of scams, and Mick soon discovers it’s dangerous to get on the bad side of the scions of the Portage elite. The real trouble breaks, though, when the kids find the body of a murdered prostitute floating in a pond and begin to piece together bits of sketchy evidence that point to a killing and cover-up orchestrated by the movers and shakers in Portage. Their first impulse is to beat it out of town for their own safety, but when hiding out on a shoestring quickly becomes impossible, they return to Portage to confide in a sheriff they gamble on being trustworthy and face down the cadre of men out to silence them. What could be a fairly prosaic mystery story gains extra traction from the vulnerabilities and flaws of the teens, particularly Grace, whose desperate amorality would make her feel at home in a Hitchcock screenplay. Readers who sweat bullets through Price’s Desert Angel (BCCB 12/11) will grab this right up.

Elizabeth Bush
Reviewer
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