The Last to Die

March 27, 2017
Six high school students plan and carry out robberies of each other’s homes for kicks in Garrett’s debut novel. Narrator Harper Jacobs, 16, is bright, athletic, sarcastic, and bored. She and five wealthy friends—her boyfriend Gin, as well as Sarah, Alex, Benji, and Paisley—take turns robbing one another’s homes, though they establish ground rules from the start, designed to limit their actions to mostly harmless mischief (“we wouldn’t steal anything that insurance and an AMEX card couldn’t replace”). When Alex suggests burgling the home of a student outside their group, things quickly go wrong, and Harper realizes that it’s no longer a game. The decision to end the game becomes moot after Sarah dies from an overdose, but is it suicide, an accident, or murder? Garrett’s teens are realistically (if one-dimensionally) self-involved, though Harper and some of the others have flashes of insight that point toward their evolving maturity as things spiral out of control. A second death paves the way to an unexpected conclusion in this quick-moving thriller. Ages 14–up.

February 15, 2017
Burglaries turn deadly for a group of spoiled teenagers.Harper, Alex, Sarah, Paisley, Benji, and Gin come from similarly privileged homes. Their parents make up for a lack of commitment to their high school offspring by providing unfettered access to life's material benefits: cars, clothes, and costly vacations. When getting drunk on booze filched from their folks' well-stocked liquor cabinets palls, they invent an exciting new game. Each time one of the teens' families goes skiing in Vail or snorkeling in the Bahamas, a designated member of the pack breaks into the unattended house and collects an assortment of trophies to be pawned for ready cash. The rules of the looting are strict. Only one member breaks into each house, nothing is to be stolen that can't be replaced with insurance money, and nothing stolen from other members of the group. Harper adds one more rule: no stealing from her deaf sister, Maggie. After one full round of felonious fun, the wheels start to come off the crime spree. Sarah dies from a drug overdose. The police can't decide if it's an accident or suicide, but Harper is sure it's neither. She thinks Sarah is too smart to overdose on her own and too conceited to kill herself. And since no one outside her little group exists for Harper, one of her fellow thieves must have killed her. Going to the authorities is a no-go because it would reveal the group's role in the burglaries and spoil their chances of admission to an Ivy League college. So Harper and her chums sit around and wait to see if anything else bad happens. It does. Unfortunately, even Harper's protectiveness toward her sister carries its own whiff of smugness. Garrett's failure to produce any sympathetic characters makes her debut tough going.

COPYRIGHT(2017) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.