MY LAST KISS

Like Jay Asher did so powerfully in Thirteen Reasons Why, debut author Bethany Neal's MY LAST KISS explores the mystery of death, the consequences of our actions, and the fatal power a lie can hold when you believe it to be true.

Cassidy Haines is dead, so it's pretty confusing when she comes to in the river the morning after her seventeenth birthday party staring at her body—her other lifeless body—bloody and mangled on the snow covered riverbank. She can't remember anything from her birthday week and it seems now that no one can see or hear her, so she figures she must be a ghost. Until she discovers her boyfriend, Ethan Keys, can actually see and touch her (she painfully dissolves into glittery dust when she touches anyone else) and she begins to question exactly why she ghosted back to life and what led to her untimely death. A series of out-of-body flashbacks that she literally melts into and can't control reveal rumors of a breakup with Ethan and that she drank schnapps on the covered bridge with a different guy that night. His face was shadowed in the memory, but she has a sense that she knew him, which leads her to suspect her fall off the bridge wasn't a drunken accident like everyone assumes. On top of her suspicions, a preternatural force pulses inside her, guiding her to people and locations that trigger more memories. The truth reveals multiple betrayals by and between her closest friends, the biggest of which she committed. Torn between wanting to stay with Ethan and the undeniable compulsion to clear her name by exposing the truth about her death, Cassidy must delve into her past and face all the decisions she made, good and bad, that led to her last kiss.