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SEVEN FOR A SECRET

Mary E. Roach

Sadie meets The Female of the Species in this YA thriller starring Nev, one of eight missing girls from a group home called Sister's Place - and the only one who returned.
In the town of Avan Island, there was a group home called Sister's Place. It housed girls no one cared about, girls who had nothing and no one but each other. Over the course of six months, eight girls from the home seemingly disappeared, never to return.

But one girl did.

Nev is the girl who returned. The girl who survived. She's done her best to leave what happened in the forest on Avan Island behind her, but now, five years later, the men in charge of Sister's Place, the men who brushed the missing girls off as "runaways," are turning up dead. And Nev realizes that confronting the town that was all to happy to forget her may be her only chance to get answers about what happened to her sisters.

As Nev is pulled deeper into Avan's secrets and as more bodies pile up she must unravel the mysteries locked in her own mind as she hunts down a killer who is willing to do anything to make sure the past stays buried.

Lost sisters, female rage, and the determination to survive drive Nev on her propulsive journey to find answers and peace and maybe revenge.

SEVEN FOR A SECRET has been named one of Marie Claire's 18 Most-Anticipated Mystery-Thrillers of 2025.

Mary E. Roach is a former teacher who now writes across genres and age categories, most recently thrillers and romance. When she is not writing stories for powerful girls, Mary enjoys running, teaching martial arts, and disappearing into the wilderness. Mary lives in St. Paul with her fiancée and their very disagreeable cat, Lulu.
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Published 2025-09-30 by Disney Hyperion

Comments

One of Marie Claire's 18 Most-Anticipated Mystery-Thriller Books of 2025

At once a gentle love letter to forgotten girls and a vicious indictment of the culture that pushes them to the fringesjust as wrathful as it is satisfying, like a furious scream that demands to be heard.

The work converges with the meeting of past and present; Nev is the primary narrator in first-person present, while the dead girls speak in first-person plural, providing an eerie, poignant element to the narrative. Overall, this is a luminously written, bleak story, but not without hope.

Roach carefully draws out the suspense, and her strong pacing allows the details fall into place, pulling readers into this story of vulnerable young women and the impact on their lives of powerful men with status in their community. A grimly atmospheric and unsettling mystery.

An unflinching portrait of lost innocence, as well as a heartbreaking exploration of sisterhood and survival, Roach's sophomore thriller is one not to be missed.