More of the Season’s Best Books for Teens On Your List

Found, by Harlan Coben (Mickey Bolitar #3)
The Mickey Bolitar books are a spinoff of Coben’s adult Myron Bolitar series—Myron is Mickey’s uncle. Like all of Coben’s work, Found features crackling dialogue and full-throttle plotting. Teen sleuth and basketball champ Mickey continues following the trail of his allegedly deceased father, and grapples with other mysteries including a drug scandal involving fellow student athletes and a friend’s missing internet boyfriend.

Hollow City, by Ransom Riggs
Riggs’ debut novel, Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children, is an atmospheric story about 16-year-old Jacob, who, following a family tragedy, travels to an isolated Welsh island with his father. There he discovers an abandoned orphanage that may not be as abandoned as it seems. In Hollow City, Jacob and the highly unusual inhabitants of Miss Peregrine’s leave their home behind, traveling to World War II-era London to save their protectress and fight for the safety of “peculiars” everywhere.

The Book Thief, by Markus Zusak
Zusak’s heartbreaking book, set in Nazi Germany and narrated by Death itself, has become both a bestseller and a film. It follows the tumultuous early years of Liesel Meminger, the foster child of German parents who live quietly subversive lives under Nazi rule, paying the price in various ways for their support of Jewish refugee Max. Liesel, the “book thief” of the title, finds comfort in reading despite living a life consistently visited by Death, and learns to stay true to her beliefs in the most dangerous of times.

Vicious (Pretty Little Liars #16), by Sara Shepard
In the 16th and final installment of this twisting mean-girl epic, four pretty Rosewood girls with loads of dark secrets are on trial for a crime they didn’t commit: the murder of their dastardly former queen bee, Ali. She’s made their lives hell and faked her own death more than once, and as her last psychotic act, she intends to send them all to prison for good. The girls’ only hope is to get as down, dirty, and devious as Ali herself, in an attempt to tangle her in her own web and clear their names.

Uncaged, by John Sandford and Michele Cook (Singular Menace #1)
This political thriller, cowritten by bestselling novelist Sandford, combines kids in peril with the dangerous side of animal-rights activism. Foster child Shay goes looking for her brother after he disappears following his animal-rights group’s strike on the scary Singularity corporation. A street artist and his footloose gang of street kids step up to help Shay, but Singularity will stop at nothing to keep its secrets hidden.

Conversion, by Katherine Howe
In this dual narrative, modern-day teens succumb to disturbing, seemingly contagious symptoms—seizures, gagging, fits. Could the outbreak have supernatural origins? The second story is set three centuries prior, when the teens’ hometown of Danvers, Massachusetts, was known as Salem Village. One of the original accusers from the infamous Salem witch trials has stepped forward to come clean about what she’s done,.

Asylum (Asylum #1), by Madeleine Roux
If there’s anything horror stories have taught us, it’s that all decommissioned mental institutions should be demolished the day they shut their doors, because no good has ever come from an abandoned asylum. In Roux’s novel, the first in a planned trilogy, three students at prestigious New Hampshire College Prep find themselves housed in Brookline, a former psychiatric hospital now repurposed as a dorm. Their troubles combine with the ghosts of Brookline’s bloody past to create hair-raising, suspenseful horror heightened by the creepy photo illustrations included throughout the book. Beware: the images linger.
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