From the author of When I Was You comes a spinetingling new thriller about a mother’s worst nightmare come true, when her teenage daughter goes to a sleepover and doesn’t come back.
WHERE I LEFT HER
by Amber Garza
Mira, August 2021
Whitney had some misgivings when she dropped her increasingly moody teenage daughter, Amelia, off at Lauren’s house. She’d never met the parents, and usually she’d go in, but Amelia clearly wasn’t going to let something so humiliating happen, so instead Whitney waved to her daughter before pulling away from the little house with the roses in front.
But when she goes back the next day, an elderly couple answers the door—Amelia and Lauren aren’t there, and this couple swears they never were, that she’s at the wrong house. As Whitney searches for Amelia, she uncovers a trail of lies her daughter has told her—from the Finsta account to rumors of a secret relationship. Does she really even know this girl she’s raised? And Amelia’s not the only one with secrets. Could Whitney’s own demons have something to do with her daughter’s disappearance, and can Whitney find her before it’s too late?
Garza’s previous book, When I Was You, was optioned by FocusFeatures and sold in eight territories.
Amber Garza is the author of several novels and When I Was You was her thriller debut. She lives with her husband and two kids in Folsom, California.

Daniel leads a rich life in the university town of Athens, Georgia. He’s got a couple close friends, a steady paycheck working for a regional airline, and of course, for a few glorious days each Fall, college football tailgates. He considers himself to be a mostly lucky guy—despite the fact that he’s suffered from a debilitating disease since he was a small child, one that has left him unable to speak or to move without a wheelchair. Daniel spends the hours he’s not online communicating with irate air travelers observing his neighborhood from his front porch. One young woman passes by so frequently that spotting her out the window has almost become part of his daily routine, until the day he’s almost sure he sees her being kidnapped. Featuring a great cast of charactrers, HOW LUCKY is as suspenseful as it is moving.
In darkness, a song can lead the way. Beware which one you listen to. On the day of the spirits festival, the old woman who lives in the forest appears in Abeni’s village with a terrible message: “You ignored my warnings. It’s too late to run. They are coming.”
A quick, straightforward, fast-paced read about Mateo, a boy who not only can fight off disease in a world where antibiotics have lost all of their power, but can heal others. This amazing kid is being hunted by those who want to harness and potentially extinguish his ability. When two detectives find themselves caught in the crossfire of the pursuit, they put their careers and their lives at risk, deciding to deliver Mat to The Resistance—an organization they’ve been trained to view as an enemy to the State but soon start to realize is probably society’s last, best hope.
Beginning in his own hometown of New Orleans, Clint Smith leads the reader through an unforgettable tour of monuments and landmarks—those that are honest about the past and those that are not—that offer an intergenerational story of how slavery has been central in shaping our nation’s collective history, and ourselves. It is the story of the Monticello Plantation in Virginia, the estate where Thomas Jefferson wrote letters espousing the urgent need for liberty while enslaving over 400 people on the premises. It is the story of the Whitney Plantation, one of the only former plantations devoted to preserving the experience of the enslaved people whose lives and work sustained it. It is the story of Angola, a former plantation-turned maximum security prison in Louisiana that is filled with Black men who work across the 18,000-acre land for virtually no pay. And it is the story of Blandford Cemetery, the final resting place of tens of thousands of Confederate soldiers. In a deeply researched and transporting exploration of the legacy of slavery and its imprint on centuries of American history, HOW THE WORD IS PASSED illustrates how some of our country’s most essential stories are hidden in plain view—whether in places we might drive by on our way to work, holidays such as Juneteenth, or entire neighborhoods—like downtown Manhattan—on which the brutal history of the trade in enslaved men, women and children has been deeply imprinted.