Fourteen-year-old Ava Bonney has a curiosity about dead things. She keeps a secret roadkill body farm in an abandoned garden near the local motorway and likes to sneak out of her flat in the dead of night to note the decomposition rates of her finds. But on this particular evening in May 1981, she discovers the putrefying body of her classmate Mickey Grant, who disappeared from a local disco two weeks ago. “Ava knew him as an unpleasant boy, a bully you couldn’t walk past without him saying something spiteful. When he went missing, Ava hadn’t cared.” But she telephones the police and, not wanting to reveal her unusual hobby, disguises her voice as Mrs. Poshy-Snob, a woman with a low voice and flawless diction. When he interviews Ava during his inquiries, Detective Sergeant Seth Delahaye is impressed by the teen’s intelligence and self-possession. Signs point to a monstrous serial killer at work after Ava and her best friend John find another mutilated corpse, that of a six-year-old boy. In alternating chapters, Tierney’s compelling narrative follows Ava’s and Delahaye’s separate investigations until the two threads braid into a chilling climax. Ava’s precocity may remind readers of Alan Bradley’s 11-year-old amateur sleuth, Flavia de Luce, but Ava uses her morbid studies to escape an unhappy home life, and her territory is not a cozy English village but the gritty, impoverished suburb of Rudery, South Birmingham. Selected as a finalist in the Daily Mail First Novel competition, this astonishing, beautifully written debut is creepy, gruesome, and heartbreaking. One of the best thrillers of the year.
5
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