The Girl in the Picture

Gr 9 Up—The hallowed halls of Oyster Bay Preparatory School are rocked with scandal and tragedy after senior soccer star Chace Porter, son of a U.S. Congressman, is found dead in the woods. A full-scale murder investigation begins, and police narrow their suspects to Chace's closest friends. At the top of the list are his beautiful, popular girlfriend, Lana Rivera, and the girl whose picture was found in the victim's pocket: Nicole Morgan, a brilliant nobody. No one seems to know why Lana and Nicole, former roommates and friends, stopped talking months before Chace was found, or the reasons why Chace was always sneaking off somewhere. Monir constructs multiple backstories that piece together remnants of events that Lana and Nicole are struggling to remember but would rather forget. And she coaxes individualistic characters out of common tropes: Lana, the "girl everyone wants to be," has a frank internal monologue that prevents her from coming across as a typical mean girl. Nicole wears her low self-esteem like a cloak, much like an eccentric savant would in a "Gossip Girl" high school setting, but her interior discourse is searching and endearing. The strongest pull for readers, though, will be solving the mystery, and although the actions of the police and the culprit occasionally feel unrealistic, Monir effectively keeps readers guessing until nearly the end.