A house party turns deadly in this tightly wound thriller set against an icy Alaskan winter.
BLOOD LIKE WATER
by Jennifer Lynn Alvarez
Delacorte, Fall 2025
(via Sterling Lord Literistic))
Finley, Mya, River, and Eli. They were inseparable as kids, running wild on Alaska’s vast wide-open spaces. Then tragedy struck, and Finley moved to the lower 48. But now it’s senior year, and Finley’s back in Anchorage. When Mya throws a house party on a snowy Valentine’s Day night, it’s supposed to be a chance for the friends to reforge old bonds. But an encounter with a mysterious stranger quickly turns the evening into a nightmare. What happened that night was an accident, right? Or was there intent? Either way, loyalty takes a dark turn when Mya, the group’s de facto leader, pressures the friends into a pact of silence, plunging them into a web of deception. Now a man’s missing, the police are involved, and Finley doesn’t know what to do or who to trust.
Jennifer Lynn Alvarez is the author of the young adult thrillers, Lies Like Wildfire, Friends Like These, and two middle-grade fantasy series, The Guardian Herd and Riders of The Realm. She earned her degree in English Literature from UC Berkeley and is the Sonoma County Coordinator for SCBWI. Jennifer lives in Tennessee and often travels to Northern California.
Mistake number one: Fun-loving Jake tells his girlfriend Jessica that they have to go to Tegan’s end of summer party in their tiny California beach town. Jessica doesn’t like parties and she doesn’t like Tegan, who has an obvious, obsessive crush on Jake. But Jessica agrees to go, to make Jake happy.