It has been said that the best way to remain famous and popular is to die young, and that is one lesson that the ghost of Phoebe Dean really took to heart.

In the small, smothering, depressing town of West Wilmer, nothing shines quite as bright as Phoebe. This straight-A student still does extra credit and volunteers at soup kitchens while babbling about her dreams of attending medical school one day. If there’s anything to mar her picture-perfect reputation, it’s her brother, Grant, the high school football champion whose indulgent weekends of beers and girls are starting to catch up with him. However, that’s not the only thing that draws the public’s attention to Grant and Phoebe. The two have always been very, very close; Phoebe’s jealousy over Grant’s relationships with girls has been a well-documented phenomenon.

"The final twist in TWENTY-SEVEN MINUTES is deeply rewarding. Although keen readers will be able to spot the clues early, Tate practices a great deal of restraint with her reveals, keeping them perfectly timed and believable."

But that all fades away when Grant crashes his truck into the guardrail of a bridge when driving home from a party one night. Phoebe, unbuckled in the passenger seat, was the sole fatality that night, though Grant and a fellow passenger, Becca, sustained serious injuries. Everyone expects Grant to be decimated by the loss, but there’s one oddity. Upon seeing his sister, her bones visible through her injuries and blood coating the pavement, he waited a whopping 27 minutes to call 911. Had he gotten help sooner, Phoebe would be alive today. So was Grant drunk and trying to sober up to avoid punishment, or was something much darker going on? And what was Becca, a friend of neither Phoebe nor Grant, doing in the backseat?

Ten years later, West Wilmer is still obsessed with their golden girl, but another mystery that developed that night has gone largely unnoticed. As the police rushed to the bridge to attempt to rescue Phoebe, a troubled teenage boy named Wyatt went missing. Wyatt was in and out of police cars and school suspensions and recently had been expelled, leading to an explosive fight with his hard-to-please father. So it’s easy to see why Phoebe took the front page and Wyatt’s disappearance was left to be solved by flyers printed and posted by his sister, June. Whatever happened that night, to Phoebe and to Wyatt, their families are now permanently, inextricably linked. This makes Phoebe's decennial memorial service, which is planned for the same week that June’s mother dies, quite the reminder of everything that happened back then.

When we meet June, she is reeling from the loss of her mother, who never quite healed from Wyatt’s disappearance. June’s mother drank herself into an early grave. And now June, who has lived in the shadow of her missing brother and the quiet rage of her mother, is forced to come up for air and wonder about the life she has missed.

Meanwhile, across town, Grant has been living a similar waking nightmare. His mother, who never hid her preference for her daughter, has mythologized Phoebe like a goddess. Grant, who still deals with pain in his formerly injured leg, is tortured by his sister’s ghost, his hazy memories of that night, and the town’s unwillingness to let sleeping dogs lie. Also haunted by the tragedy is Becca, who believes that she and Grant have been in a long-term, whirlwind romance since even before the night of Phoebe’s death. Becca knows they told some lies about the accident, but she is adamant they did it for love. Now she is ready to take their relationship public, regardless of the social repercussions.

As the memorial approaches, each character is tested on their memories of the night of Phoebe’s death, of Phoebe herself, and of Wyatt and his potential connection to the Deans. Alternating between the perspectives of Grant, June, Becca and even Wyatt, debut author Ashley Tate weaves a convincing, gripping and twisted story of grief, lies and the dark secrets that hide in small-town tragedies. Tate is a skilled writer who knows how to keep the pages turning until you’re so convinced of the reality of each character that you feel you could sit down with them and ask what really happened.

The final twist in TWENTY-SEVEN MINUTES is deeply rewarding. Although keen readers will be able to spot the clues early, Tate practices a great deal of restraint with her reveals, keeping them perfectly timed and believable. As a new voice in the crime fiction genre, Tate is equal parts Celeste Ng, Joseph Knox and Ellery Lloyd. I expect that we’ll see lots of great mysteries from her in the future.