The Reunion

From the author of I Killed Zoe Spanos comes a "suspenseful and atmospheric" (Kirkus Reviews) YA thriller in the vein of The White Lotus and Karen M. McManus's The Cousins following a doomed family reunion at a posh Caribbean resort, where old grudges and dangerous secrets culminate in murder.

Eleven Mayweathers went on vacation. Ten came home.

It's been years since the fragmented Mayweather clan was all in one place, but the engagement of Addison and Mason's mom to the dad of their future stepbrother, Theo, brings the whole family to sunny Cancún, Mexico, for winter break. Add cousin Natalia to the mix, and it doesn't take long for tempers to fray and tensions to rise. A week of forced family "fun" reveals that everyone has something to hide, and as secrets bubble to the surface, no one is safe from the fallout. By the end of the week, one member of the reunion party will be dead-and everyone's a suspect:
The peacekeeper: Addison needs a better hiding place.
The outsider: Theo just wants to mend fences.
The romantic: Natalia doesn't want to talk about the past.
The hothead: Mason needs to keep his temper under control.

It started as a week in paradise meant to bring them together. But the Mayweathers are about to learn the hard way that family bonding can be deadly.

Autorentext
Kit Frick is a MacDowell Fellow and International Thriller Writers Award finalist from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. She studied creative writing at Sarah Lawrence College and received her MFA from Syracuse University. She is the author of the adult suspense novels The Split and Friends and Liars, the young adult thrillers Before We Were Sorry (originally published as See All the Stars), All Eyes on Us, I Killed Zoe Spanos, Very Bad People, and The Reunion, and the poetry collection A Small Rising Up in the Lungs. Kit loves a good mystery but has only ever killed her characters. Honest. Visit Kit online at KitFrick.com and on Instagram @KitFrick.

Klappentext

It's been years since the fragmented Mayweather clan was all in one place, but an engagement brings the family to sunny Cancún. A week of forced family fun reveals that everyone has something to hide, and as secrets bubble to the surface, no one is safe from the fallout. By the end of the week, one of them will be dead - and everyone's a suspect.

Zusammenfassung
From the author of I Killed Zoe Spanos comes a YA thriller in the vein of The White Lotus and Karen M. McManus’s The Cousins following a doomed family reunion at a posh Caribbean resort, where old grudges and dangerous secrets culminate in murder.

Eleven Mayweathers went on vacation. Ten came home.

It’s been years since the fragmented Mayweather clan was all in one place, but the engagement of Addison and Mason’s mom to the dad of their future stepbrother, Theo, brings the whole family to sunny Cancún, Mexico, for winter break. Add cousin Natalia to the mix, and it doesn’t take long for tempers to fray and tensions to rise. A week of forced family “fun” reveals that everyone has something to hide, and as secrets bubble to the surface, no one is safe from the fallout. By the end of the week, one member of the reunion party will be dead—and everyone’s a suspect:
The peacekeeper: Addison needs a better hiding place.
The outsider: Theo just wants to mend fences.
The romantic: Natalia doesn’t want to talk about the past.
The hothead: Mason needs to keep his temper under control.

It started as a week in paradise meant to bring them together. But the Mayweathers are about to learn the hard way that family bonding can be deadly.

Leseprobe
Chapter 1: One Week Ago Tuesday, December 26

1 ONE WEEK AGO TUESDAY, DECEMBER 26 Six Days Until the Engagement Party

ADDISON

The Acker-Mayweathers are accustomed to breezing through life’s annoying little lines—at the farmers’ market, the post office, the florist where Mom buys fresh-cut lilies on Sundays “to brighten up the breakfast nook.” People know us in Rhyne Ridge. People let us through. But the Cancún International Airport is six hours and one connecting flight away from New York’s Hudson Valley, and here, we are three cogs in an epic crush of sweaty, stinking bodies, everyone trying to make their way from the arrival gate to the six men and women in their little plexiglass huts checking passports and releasing exhausted travelers into the bright Caribbean sunshine.

“This blows.” My twin brother, Mason Acker-Mayweather. For the third time in the last five minutes, he lets his backpack slump from one shoulder to the floor.

“Mason, don’t say ‘blows.’?” Our mom, Elizabeth Acker-Mayweather. She twists her shiny brown hair behind her, then pats her wrist fruitlessly for a hair tie. The air-conditioning is blasting, but it’s no match for the sheer magnitude of body heat in here.

We landed approximately forty-five minutes ago, an arrival time apparently shared by every other international flight touching down in Cancún on the day after Christmas. After half an hour inching along a corridor stretching from our gate to a single escalator, we descended into the massive sea of travelers already jammed into the Passport Control hall, everyone jostling to join the six long lines snaking their way toward the agents at the front. I do a quick head count of the travelers in my general circumference, then multiply by eighteen, the approximate quantity of similarly sized areas in the hall. Roughly, there are nine hundred people inside, all waiting to see six agents.

An airport official glances at our customs slips and ushers us toward the end of line five. Give or take, one hundred and fifty people wait ahead of us. We’re going to be here a while.

I click open my red roller case and pull out the novel I need to have finished for Miss Dern’s class when I get back to school next week. Then I flip my suitcase on its side and take a seat.

“I don’t know how you can read in here,” Mason says, squatting down next to me. “It’s loud as hell.”

“White noise.” I shrug. I’m good with words, but lit has never been my favorite. I’m a science and math girl. So the faster I can get through this book, the less of the trip I’ll spend with it hanging over me.

But Mason clearly isn’t going to let me read in peace. “Have you tried the Wi-Fi? I can’t get past terms and conditions.”

I shake my head. “Reading.”

“Can you try it, though? Or give me your phone.”

I dig it out of my pocket and hand it over. There’s nothing on my phone my brother and cousins can’t see; I made sure of that before this trip. “Help yourself. But there are nearly a thousand people in this room alone trying to log on. The network is overloaded.”

The line inches forward, and I scoot my suitcase up a foot, then sit back down. Mason pokes at the screen and scowls, clearly getting nowhere. When we were little, people always wanted to know if we had that “twin thing,” which seemed to mean something between a deep empathetic understanding of one another and straight-up telepathy. We didn’t, even then, but we were close in the way many little siblings are close. And we looked a lot alike, for fraternal twins. Dusty blond hair, which we got from our dad, small noses and wide-set blue eyes from Mom. And we were both short for our age.

That changed in sixth grade, when Mason shot up and filled out, shoulders and chest broadening faster than most high school boys, and…