They were eleven when they sent a killer to prison…but they were liars. This is a twisty, adult suspense debut from an author of novels for younger readers.

WHAT LIES IN THE WOODS
by Kate Alice Marshall
Flatiron/St. Martin’s Press, January 2023

Twenty-two years ago, Naomi Shaw believed in magic. She and her two best friends, Cassidy and Olivia, spent that summer roaming the woods of Chester, Washington, imagining a world of ceremony and wonder—the Goddess Game. The summer ended suddenly, with Cass and Liv stumbling onto the road covered in blood. Naomi had been attacked, was nearly dead. But miraculously, Naomi survived her seventeen stab wounds, and lived to identify the man who had hurt her. The girls’ testimony put away a serial killer, wanted for murdering six women. They were heroes. And they were liars. The day she learns that Alan Michael Stahl has died in prison, Naomi gets a call from Olivia. For twenty-two years, the friends have kept a secret worth killing for: a skeleton in the woods that was the center of their rituals and imagined magic that summer. But now Olivia wants to tell, and Naomi is forced back to the town she’d escaped. When Olivia disappears, Naomi sets out to find out what really happened in the woods—no matter how dangerous the truth turns out to be. Naomi thought the Goddess Game was over. But it’s just beginning.

Kate Alice Marshall is the author of the young adult novels I Am Still Alive, Rules for Vanishing, and Our Last Echoes, as well as the Secrets of Eden Eld middle grade series. She lives outside of Seattle, where she spends her time playing board games, tending a chaotic vegetable garden, and wrangling dogs and children.