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End-of-the-Year Contest 2024

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Shari Lapena, author of What Have You Done?

Nothing ever happens in sleepy little Fairhill, Vermont. But this morning that will change. And one innocent question could be deadly. What have you done? The teenagers get their kicks telling ghost stories in the old graveyard. The parents trust that their kids will arrive home safe from school. Everyone knows everyone. Curtains rarely twitch. Front doors are left unlocked. But Diana Brewer isn’t lying safely in her bed where she belongs. Instead she lies in a hayfield, circled by vultures, discovered by a local farmer. How quickly a girl becomes a ghost. How quickly a town of friendly, familiar faces becomes a town of suspects, a place of fear and paranoia. Someone in Fairhill did this. Everyone wants answers.

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What Have You Done? by Shari Lapena

August 2024

I am not sure how she does it, but all of Shari Lapena’s books are absolute page-turners. This time I tried to slow myself down to see if I could analyze her method, but once again her propulsive storytelling did not allow this.

WHAT HAVE YOU DONE? opens in Fairhill, Vermont, where everything is beautiful and bucolic. One morning, a local farmer finds in his field the body of a young woman that is being feasted upon by vultures. For the record, the description of the vultures was enough to get the hair on my arms standing up. Soon the victim is identified as Diana Brewer, a local high school senior, and the chatter starts up about how she got there and who wanted her killed.

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