THRILLS AND CHILLS
Small literary press Wolsak & Wynn ventures into YA fiction for the first time with the July release of David Neil Lee’s The Midnight Games. Described as a blend of Lovecraftian horror and modern mystery, the story tells of Neil Silva, who discovers something sinister is going on in the local stadium at the witching hour. (Two words: giant centipedes.) In what sounds like a cross between Friday the 13th and those bizarre “room” games, Kelley Armstrong’s The Masked Truth (Doubleday Canada, Oct.) takes readers to a therapy camp for troubled teens, where the kids are anything but all right. Edmonton-born Amoeba Music founder Yvonne Prinz will publish If You’re Lucky with Algonquin Young Readers in October. In the book, 17-year-old Georgia becomes suspicious of a boy named Fin, who shows up shortly after her brother’s mysterious surfing death claiming to be his best friend. A watery grave is at the centre of poet Joanna Weston’s Frame and the McGuire (Tradewind Books, Oct.), in which a girl and her brother search for answers about their uncle’s suspicious drowning. From Annick Press in September comes a YA debut from Dr. Brinkley’s Tower author Robert Hough. In Diego’s Crossing, the title character finds himself unwillingly swept into the Mexican drug trade in order to save his brother.
GHOSTIES AND GHOULIES
Loyalist to a Fault (The Dead Kid Detective Agency #3) by Evan Munday (ECW, Sept.)
Myles and the Monster Outside by Philippa Dowding; Shawna Daigle, illus. (Dundurn, Sept.)
Sammy and the Headless Horseman by Rona Arato (Fitzhenry & Whiteside, Oct.)
An Inheritance of Ashes by Leah Bobet (Scholastic Canada, Oct.)