{"product_id":"murder-between-friends-isbn-9780593301067","title":"Murder Between Friends","description":"\u003cb\u003eTwo years ago, the murder of a neighbor tore three best friends apart--now the killer is going to walk free and the ex-friends are going to have to face the past--and each other--in another twisty thriller from the \u003ci\u003eNew York Times\u003c\/i\u003e bestselling co-author of \u003ci\u003eThe Agathas\u003c\/i\u003e.\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eGrace, Henry, and Ally grew up together on the same block. They used to be best friends--until Grace's testimony put Henry's brother, Jake, away for killing their English teacher. Now, two years later, Ally and Henry hate Grace, and Grace is doubting what she thinks she saw that night. \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eIt feels like everyone's getting a second chance, then, when due to a mistrial, Jake is suddenly released. And Henry \u003ci\u003eknows\u003c\/i\u003e his brother is innocent, but when Grace reaches out to say she’s rethinking what she saw the night of the murder, Jake’s reaction is confusing. He doesn’t want Henry—or Grace--getting involved.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eFor Ally not getting involved isn’t an option, and there’s nothing Grace can say to convince Ally she’s not the enemy. But can Ally afford to push Grace out when she’s one of the only other people willing to believe in Jake’s innocence?  \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe clock is ticking. Jake’s new trial date is about to be set, and he's sure to be found guilty again unless there's new evidence to prove he's innocent. Grace, Henry, and Ally are going to have to decide whether you can trust an old friend now that they’re your enemy.“\u003ci\u003eMurder Between Friends\u003c\/i\u003e has it all: suspense, betrayal, heartbreak, and one final twist you will not see coming. A \u003cb\u003efast-paced, juicy thriller\u003c\/b\u003e with all the heart and humor we’ve come to expect from Liz Lawson.” —Jessica Goodman, \u003ci\u003eNew York Times\u003c\/i\u003e bestselling author of \u003ci\u003eThe Counselors\u003c\/i\u003e and \u003ci\u003eThey Wish They Were Us\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“An intense story of friendship, love, and betrayal that's \u003cb\u003eingeniously crafted, thrillingly paced, and deliciously suspenseful.\u003c\/b\u003e \u003ci\u003eMurder Between Friends\u003c\/i\u003e is sure to be your new favorite mystery.” —Kathleen Glasgow, \u003ci\u003eNew York Times\u003c\/i\u003e bestselling author of \u003ci\u003eGirl in Pieces\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Full of loose threads begging to be tied up, Liz Lawson’s \u003ci\u003eMurder Between Friends \u003c\/i\u003eweaved through perspectives at a pace that gave me heart palpitations, but I barely blinked while reading. Who \u003ci\u003ewas\u003c\/i\u003e it?! Shame on me for thinking I nabbed the culprit with twenty pages to spare. \u003cb\u003eLawson is the new master of the twist.\u003c\/b\u003e” —K. L. Walther, \u003ci\u003eNew York Times\u003c\/i\u003e bestselling author of \u003ci\u003eThe Summer of Broken Rules\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“\u003ci\u003eMurder Between Friends \u003c\/i\u003eis \u003cb\u003ea spine-tingling mystery\u003c\/b\u003e that’s impossible to put down. Lawson’s unparalleled plotting skills are on full display as one seemingly isolated incident becomes linked to an even bigger, utterly unpredictable scandal. I loved this book!” —Jordyn Taylor, award-winning author of \u003ci\u003eThe Revenge Game\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“\u003cb\u003eA slick and twisty mystery\u003c\/b\u003e with a gut punch of a final chapter, \u003ci\u003eMurder Between Friends\u003c\/i\u003e begs to be read in a single sitting.” —Kara Thomas, author of \u003ci\u003eThe Cheerleaders\u003c\/i\u003e and \u003ci\u003eThe Champions\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Liz Lawson’s expert pacing, perfectly wry humor, and gasp-out-loud-worthy twists make for a propulsive mystery with a compelling emotional core about three teens trying to right the wrongs of their pasts. \u003cb\u003eBoth thrilling and thoughtful\u003c\/b\u003e, \u003ci\u003eMurder Between Friends\u003c\/i\u003e is the kind of book you immediately want to read again . . . and again and again.” —Meredith Adamo, author of \u003ci\u003eNot Like Other Girls \u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"\u003cb\u003eEvery clue in this thriller will send you spiraling.\u003c\/b\u003e Prepare to have your expectations shattered one twist at a time. The truths in this story may be more dangerous than its lies.\" —\u003ci\u003eNew York Times\u003c\/i\u003e bestselling author Jarrod Shusterman and Sofía Laputente, coauthors of \u003ci\u003eRetro\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“\u003cb\u003eA twisty high school whodunit\u003c\/b\u003e about friendship, guilt, and how far you’ll go to uncover the truth.” —Alexa Donne, Edgar Award–nominated author of \u003ci\u003ePretty Dead Queens\u003c\/i\u003e and \u003ci\u003eThe Ivies\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\"Lawson’s latest....\u003cb\u003ewill keep teen mystery fans up into the wee hours\u003c\/b\u003e, eager to see how the various threads come together....A twisty and fast-paced mystery.\" —\u003ci\u003eKirkus Reviews\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"Lawson’s \u003cb\u003eingenious twists and turns will intrigue mystery fans \u003c\/b\u003eright to the unexpected end.\" —\u003ci\u003eBooklist\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"\u003cb\u003eThe several twists the story takes will keep readers guessing\u003c\/b\u003e....A fine choice for collections where thrillers are in high ­demand.\" —\u003ci\u003eSchool Library Journal\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"It's \u003cb\u003ea fair-play mystery that features shocking twists \u003c\/b\u003eand complex friendship dynamics in equal measure.\" —\u003ci\u003ePublishers Weekly\u003c\/i\u003eLiz Lawson is the \u003ci\u003eNew York Times\u003c\/i\u003e bestselling co-author of \u003ci\u003eThe Agathas \u003c\/i\u003eand the sequel,\u003ci\u003e The Night In Question \u003c\/i\u003e(with Kathleen Glasgow), and \u003ci\u003eThe Lucky Ones\u003c\/i\u003e. Liz lives with her family and two \u003ci\u003every\u003c\/i\u003e bratty cats.\u003cb\u003eAlly\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e \u003cb\u003e \u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e October 6\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e “How do you feel, knowing they’re letting a killer out of jail today?”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e I’m getting out of my car when the question is screamed at me through the chain-­link fence that runs the perimeter of school. I turn to find a reporter, young and fresh-­faced, staring at me with excited eyes from the other side of the metal weave.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e She must not know who I am.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e I clench my keys in my fist, the sharp edges digging into the tender flesh of my palm, as I hold eye contact with her. Trying to figure out what to do. What to say. How far I want to take this.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e A few beats go by, and her smile begins to droop.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e “Jake Hanson?” she offers, like I might not know what she’s talking about. “He’s being released later today? After serving only”—­a pause here, as she scrambles  to remember—­“thirteen months of his twenty-­five-­to-­life sentence. He’s headed back. To Brawner. How does that make you feel—­”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e I slam my car door shut, heart thudding against my rib cage. Walk over to her slowly. Anger vibrating off me so hard that I’m surprised she can’t feel it—­that she doesn’t run away.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e “Most people in town are very unhappy.” This lady just can’t quit. She’s clearly misinterpreted my silence as ignorance. “The decision to vacate his sentence is enormously controversial—­as you probably know,” she adds hurriedly, like she’s remembered that I might not be entirely stupid. “Considering it was based on a technicality, rather than evidence of Jake’s innocence . . . how does it make you feel? You’re a student at Brawner High. Did you know Miriam Appelbaum? Or Jake? \u003ci\u003eDid\u003c\/i\u003e you know Jake? Did you see the fight they had that day?”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e I stop on my side of the chain-­link fence. She leans forward expectantly. She thinks I’m about to make her day, give her a great quote she can use in her broadcast. Tell her how \u003ci\u003eterrified\u003c\/i\u003e I am that Jake’s coming home. How violent he was.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e “Listen to me,” I hiss at her. “Jake Hanson is innocent. Got it? He didn’t murder anyone. You can quote me.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e And with that, I walk away.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e The hallways inside are buzzing with energy. Bad energy. The sort that comes before a riot, before people start burning things down. Everyone on edge.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e Someone crashes into me, and when they see who I am, their apology crumbles. Instead, they mutter, “Killer fucker.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e I’ve been called worse, and it’s not remotely true, yet it still takes all my willpower not to respond. But I can’t. I can’t give them the satisfaction—­not because I don’t want to, but because Henry made me promise. He knows me too well, and he said today more than any other day, I have to let things slide.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e It hurts, but I do it. I let the asshole walk away, keep my head down, enter my first-­period Spanish class without another incident.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e I spend the period on my phone. Senora De Hoyos doesn’t even notice, or at least she doesn’t really care—­no one’s paying attention as it is—­and so I’m left in peace to read awful things that people are saying about my best friend and his family on the internet.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e Everyone is screaming about how horrible it is that Jake’s being released, how he’s a murderer, how this is a travesty of the justice system. There are a ton of articles on what are essentially tabloid news sites, full of misinformation and inflammatory rhetoric about Jake and Henry and the entire Hanson family. The sort of exploitative journalism my dad always used to rant about—­it’s all about the clicks.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e I’ve been trying to keep an eye on it. Report the most vio­lent comments. Make sure no one has posted the Hansons’ address in public forums, like they did after Jake’s arrest almost two years ago.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e I tell myself what I’m doing matters, but I know I’m wrong. The comments are never taken down.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e And everyone already knows where the Hansons live.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e “Ally?” A voice cuts into my doomscrolling.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e Taylor Rudloff, assistant editor of the \u003ci\u003eBoar,\u003c\/i\u003e the school paper, is standing in front of my desk.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e “What?” Can’t she see I’m busy?\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e “Um,” she says, staring at me, hip jutted to the side, radiating judgment. “Period’s over?”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e I look around. Sure enough, everyone’s gone, outside of Taylor and Señora De Hoyos, who’s sitting behind her desk with her feet propped up on it, her own phone in front of her face.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e “Oh,” I say, my face heating. I grab my battered textbook and shove it into my bag.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e “Are you okay?” Taylor asks, out of a sense of obligation, rather than because she actually cares, I’m sure. We’re not exactly the best of friends.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e My mouth puckers. “I’m fine.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e “You sure? Because you were just sitting there after the bell went off like you didn’t even notice . . .”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e \u003ci\u003e“I’m fine,”\u003c\/i\u003e I say again, with emphasis, and she rolls her eyes. What does she think—­I’m going to tell her how I’m really doing? That all of a sudden I’m going to open up to her? Tell her that I’m worried about Henry, that I’ve texted him six times today already and haven’t heard back? I’m not an idiot. If I did, she’d use it—­write a story about it for the paper to try and take my editor in chief position.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e “Sure, Ally. Whatever.” She hikes her bag farther up her shoulder. “I’ll see you later.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e Out in the hall, I send Henry another message. Nothing long, just saying that I’m here if he needs me. He knows that, though. We’ve been best friends since preschool, a friendship that’s outlasted most everything else. Including our ex–­best friend, Grace Topham.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e I watch my phone for a long moment, but it’s silent.  I shouldn’t be surprised. Henry’s dealing with a dumpster fire.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e I make my way to the newspaper office, which, thankfully, is quiet. Everyone else is tucked away in second period, but I’m skipping. I can’t deal with sitting through another class; I have more important things to do.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e I take my notebook out of my bag and set it on the table in front of me.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e It’s filled with stuff about Ms. Appelbaum, a timeline of the night she was murdered, Jake, his trial, info from news articles, notes from Reddit boards that talked about the case. I started collecting all of it when it became clear Jake was the cops’ prime suspect. I thought maybe I could help him, because I meant what I said to that asshole reporter.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e Jake is not a killer.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e I mean, this is the same guy who used to lend me books that he liked back when we were in elementary school. He used to capture spiders in his hands and put them outside rather than kill them. Even after he started working at the record store and got all caught up with Nick Marion and those assholes, I saw flickers of his old self.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e Like the time a baby bird flew into one of the windows of the Hansons’ house and broke its wing. Jake drove an hour each way to take it to a wildlife sanctuary. Or the time Ms. Glasgow, an English teacher, dropped two huge boxes of paperwork all over the first-­floor hallway of school.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e Jake was one of the only people to stop and help her clean it up.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e He couldn’t have killed Appelbaum. He doesn’t have it in him. And it’s beyond messed up that he’s spent the past two years behind bars, but I guess we have Grace to thank for that.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e Nothing in my notebook tells me anything new. But I reread it anyway, over and over and over again, until my eyes start to ache. Then I slam it shut.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e I’m tempted to text Henry again, but I stop myself. I need to give him space.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e Instead, I grab my laptop and pull up a YouTube video of the news footage from the day Appelbaum’s body was found. Our neighborhood was a circus. News vans everywhere, people from school stopping by, neighbors gaping at the crime scene investigators dressed in white plastic suits going in and out of her house.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e I watched it all from my bedroom window. I couldn’t even cry. All my tears had been used up two months before, when my dad died.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e Even though I’ve seen all of these videos a million times, I press Play. I know everything by heart—­the news reporters’ scripts, the shots of Appelbaum’s house, our neighborhood, the city of Brawner.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e But what I’m interested in is in the background of these shots.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e It’s a well-­known fact that murderers like to visit the scene of their crimes, so I examine the faces of the people watching from behind the police tape. Try to see if there’s anything out of place. Anyone I haven’t noticed before.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e Because the thing that has been thrumming in the back of my head like a drumbeat for the past two years is this:\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e If Jake didn’t do it, that means whoever did is still out there, walking around, free to kill again.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e \u003cb\u003eOctober 6\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e \u003cb\u003e \u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e \u003cb\u003eThe Brawner Times\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e \u003cb\u003e \u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e Jacob Hanson murder conviction  vacated on a technicality\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e \u003cb\u003eBy Kate Chakravorty\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e \u003cb\u003e \u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e Jacob Hanson is set to be released today from the western Virginia federal prison where he has been incarcerated since the middle of last year. In a trial that made national news, Hanson was convicted of the first-­degree murder of local Brawner High School English teacher Miriam Appelbaum and was sentenced to twenty-­five to life behind bars.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e But a week ago, a judge approved a motion to vacate Hanson’s murder conviction. To explain this controversial decision, Landon County Circuit Court Judge Andrea Johnson cited evidence unearthed by Hanson’s new attorney, Greg Kakova, that proves District Attorney Richard Attia, who prosecuted Hanson’s original trial, had been having an affair with Judge Richard Walker, who presided over it.","brand":"Delacorte Press","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":46301259202789,"sku":"NP9780593301067","price":12.99,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/1842\/7735\/files\/9780593301067.jpg?v=1767733124","url":"https:\/\/k12savings.com\/products\/murder-between-friends-isbn-9780593301067","provider":"K12savings","version":"1.0","type":"link"}