Amateurs
3 primary works
Book 1
Everyone's dying to know the truth . . .
When Aerin Kelly was eleven, she idolised her seventeen-year-old sister, Helena, and they did everything together. They made Claymation movies and posted them to YouTube. They made fun of Windmere-Carruthers, the private school they attended, they invented new flavours for their parents' organic ice cream shop, and they dressed up their golden retriever, Buster. But when Helena went into senior year things started to change. Rather than being Aerin's inseparable sister, she started to push her away. Then, on a snowy winter's day, Helena vanished.
Four years later, Helena's body is found. Wracked with grief and refusing to give up on her sister, Aerin spends months trying to figure out what exactly happened to Helena and who killed her. But the police have no leads. A young, familiar officer named Thomas wants to help and suggests she checks out a website called Case Not Closed. Hesitantly, she posts, and when teenagers Seneca and Maddox show up on her doorstep offering to help investigate she accepts in desperation. Both have suffered their own losses and also posted to the site with no luck, so they are hoping this case might be the one they crack. But as their investigation begins, it seems that maybe it's no accident that they are all together, and that maybe the crimes have something - or someone - in common.
Book 2
'A classic whodunit with a contemporary edge' Cecily Von Ziegesar, praise for The Amateurs
Everyone knows Chelsea Dawson. Day and night, her tens of thousands of followers on Instagram watch her every move. So when she goes missing from the sunny beachside town of Lafayette, it makes headlines.
The police are searching everywhere for her kidnapper, but when eighteen-year-old Seneca Frazier sees Chelsea's picture, she knows instantly who took her. Chelsea looks exactly like her friend Aerin Kelly's murdered sister - and Seneca's own mother, who was killed five years ago.
Seneca's suspicions are confirmed when the killer contacts her, threatening to hurt Chelsea if Seneca goes to the police with what she knows. Seneca makes the only move she can, reaching out to Aerin and Maddox and Madison Wright, her friends from Case Not Closed, an amateur crime-solving community. Together they go to Lafayette to work the case, to save Chelsea, and to bring the killer to justice.
But the killer has a plan of his own. He wants Seneca and her friends in Lafayette, but he wants them to play by his rules. One wrong step could mean the end for Chelsea - or the Amateurs.
The second book in the thrilling new crime series from bestselling author Sara Shepard.
Book 3
'A classic whodunit with a contemporary edge' Cecily Von Ziegesar author of Gossip Girl on The Amateurs
The stakes are higher than ever in this third installment of THE AMATEURS, as Aerin finds herself kidnapped by the killer she knows all too well, and her friends must work to solve a puzzle laid out by the villain in order to save her.
At first, the mystery they're tasked with seems to have nothing to do with Aerin or her kidnapper. But as Seneca, Maddox and Madison hit the Jersey Shore to gather clues, they begin to uncover the true background of the killer and the horrors that shaped him into who he is. The scavenger hunt leads them to the family of a recently kidnapped boy and dark secrets they could never have seen coming. As Aerin struggles to play nice with the person who killed her sister in order to buy herself time, her friends work feverishly against the ticking clock that could mean her life, and every clue they uncover leads Seneca to suspect she's more connected to the killer's history than she ever realised ...
With nail-biting suspense, twisted secrets and non-stop action, this final installment in #1 New York Times bestselling author of Pretty Little Liars Sara Shepard's THE AMATEURS series will shock and delight even the savviest of readers with its big reveal.