The Roanoke Girls

January 9, 2017
YA author Engel (The Book of Ivy) makes her adult debut with a gripping if creepy thriller set on the Kansas prairie. Lane Roanoke fervently hoped she had seen the last of Roanoke, the family homestead, when she fled Kansas for Los Angeles as a desperate 16-year-old, but now a decade later the disappearance of her cousin Allegra, the only kin to whom she feels a connection, compels her to return against her better judgment. Indeed, with local law enforcement stymied, it seems that the only hope of solving the mystery lies with Lane and whatever clues she can dredge up from memories of the traumatic summer the two cousins shared as teens. Skipping lightly between past and present, including Lane’s efforts to finally come to terms with the two most influential men in her life—dangerously seductive family patriarch Yates and roguish Cooper Sullivan, her never-forgotten first love—this gothic page-turner speeds inexorably toward the kinds of devastating revelations readers won’t soon forget. Agent: Jodi Reamer, Writers House.

October 15, 2016

Fifteen years old when her mother commits suicide, Lane Roanoke must go live with her indifferent grandparents in rural Kansas but bonds with spiky cousin Allegra. A devastating family secret drives her away until she learns that Allegra has gone missing. Engel's first adult novel after the YA titles The Book of Ivy and The Revolution of Ivy; with a 100,000-copy first printing.

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