Deadly animals : a novel / Marie Tierney.

Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

Finding a dead body is not normal. But Ava is not a normal teenager. In this chillingly beautiful mystery, only the obsessive spirit of youth can save a desperate town from the savagery within.

Ava Bonney is a compassionate and studious fourteen-year-old girl with a dark secret: she has an obsessive interest in the macabre. She is fascinated by the rate at which dead animals decompose. The highway she lives by regularly offers up gifts of roadkill, and in the dead of night Ava loves nothing more than to pull her latest discovery into her roadside den and record her findings.

One night, she stumbles across the body of her classmate and, fearing that her secret ritual could be revealed, she makes an anonymous call to the police. But when Detective Seth Delahaye is given the case, Ava won't step back--not while teenagers continue to go missing.

Racing alongside the police or against them, Ava is determined to figure out who is hunting her classmates before she becomes the next prey. How hard can it be to track a killer?

Reviews provided by Syndetics

Publishers Weekly Review

A precocious teenager helps British cops hunt a killer in Tierney's offbeat debut. Aspiring 14-year-old forensic pathologist Ava Bonney is sneaking out of her South Birmingham home at 2 a.m. to visit the secret spot where she stashes and studies roadkill when she discovers the corpse of local teen bully Mickey Grant, who's been missing for two weeks. It's dark, but Ava can still see human bite marks on Mickey's decomposing flesh. She calls the authorities from a phone booth, disguising her voice, and returns home. When Det. Sgt. Seth Delahaye of the West Midlands Police comes canvassing the next day, Ava keeps quiet about the call, but offers keen observations about Mickey that prompt Delahaye to consult her when other children go missing. Meanwhile, Ava conducts her own clandestine investigation, discovering a disturbingly cruel animal death that may be the work of the same killer and digging into rumors about a man-sized wolf. Despite two-dimensional supporting characters and the disorienting juxtaposition of wacky plotting with lurid descriptions of violence, Ava earns readers' investment in this macabre procedural--she's a clever, compassionate, and resourceful protagonist with series-carrying potential. Mo Hayder fans will find much to admire. (Nov.)

Booklist Review

Wise beyond her years, Ava is a 13-yearold girl with an interesting hobby. She is fascinated with dead animals and sneaks out of her house at night to study their decomposing bodies. On one of her excursions, Ava discovers the body of a local missing boy and decides to investigate the murder herself. Her intelligence impresses the lead detective on the case, who uses Ava's local expertise to help the investigation. When another boy goes missing, Ava realizes it's up to her to find the killer before they strike again. Tierney's debut novel is a dark, twisted story featuring a unique heroine and a haunting mystery. Horror and supernatural elements add creepiness to the story, and the book's 1980s setting lets the mystery unfold without the help of DNA or more modern forensics. Ava's relationship with the detectives is a bright spot in an otherwise intense story (even if her involvement in the case at times comes across as unbelievable). Thriller fans who like their stories on the darker side will adore this book.

Kirkus Book Review

A teenage girl with a taste for the macabre makes a series of horrific discoveries that turn her life and the lives of everyone in her British neighborhood upside down. Fourteen-year-old Ava Bonney loves nothing better than to study the decomposing bodies of animals she finds littered along the motorway that runs through Birmingham. But when she accidentally comes across the bodies of two young people--one a teenager like herself, and the other a small boy--who have had their throats ripped out by a set of human teeth, she realizes a predator is stalking the town's children. In this chilling novel, Tierney pairs the precocious Ava with an open-minded police detective named Seth Delahaye to create an unlikely--and memorable--crime fighting duo. An "eternal student" gifted with the willingness to learn from everyone he meets, Delahaye appreciates Ava's intelligence and preternatural ability to read between the lines of physical evidence, which he witnesses firsthand when she begins anonymously calling the police station with information about the murders. Her observation that the murderer is a deeply disturbed young person who suffers from clinical lycanthropy goes against what Delahaye expects to find. But the closer the two get to uncovering the killer, the more it becomes clear that Ava's shocking conclusions hold more truth than anyone could want or imagine. By turns terrifying and heartbreaking in its depictions of the bloodthirsty killer--and, by extension, the brutality that lies at the heart of every human being--this eloquent, darkly suspenseful debut novel will haunt the reader's imagination. An edge-of-your-seat thriller with a savage twist. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.