Emily’s father came home after a trip out to the woods — somewhere he went regularly — and he had the body of a teen girl in his arms.

She was dead.

It doesn’t take long before police arrive and Emily’s father’s put into jail, accused of murdering the girl. He was the only one it could be, right? But Emily has more questions than answers, though she is positive her dad was in no way responsible for killing Ashlee. Sure, he might suffer PTSD and he might not always be in his rightest of minds, but her father isn’t a killer and no way will she let him be locked up for the crime he didn’t commit.

Welcome to Lucy Christopher’s The Killing Woods.

Damon is the boyfriend of the girl — Ashlee — who was found in the woods. He’s at peace with the idea that the person who killed Ashlee has been found, but he’s not at all at peace with how she died in the first place. Worse, he feels immense guilt because when she died, he was too drunk and high from their playing “the Game” to know up from down or even be aware of what was happening around him.

All he knows is that they went into the woods and she didn’t come out alive.

Christopher’s novel is told in alternating view points, both of which are full of desperation. Emily determined to clear her father’s name from the crime and Damon, determined to find out just what happened and how Ashlee died. Emily and Damon aren’t coming together on this; quite the opposite, in fact. School’s turning into a real hell hole from Emily, as people see what they believe her father did as somehow something she should have to suffer for further.

But even if the two of them aren’t coming together, Emily and Damon will come together, when they realize that the only way to put the entire story to bed is if they figure out the timeline of events. Who was really in the woods? What really happened to Ashlee? What role did Emily’s dad actually play in her death, if any at all? The novel is built upon the two of them investigating this independently but it’s when they have to piece it together collaboratively that the tensions and stakes rise even higher.

The woods in Christopher’s novel are exceptionally depicted. Part of why the woods matter so much is because of what they meant to Emily’s father. The woods contained an old bunker, and he liked to spend his time in there. Maybe “liked to spend his time there” is a bit misleading. Emily’s father felt somewhat comforted by the bunker’s presence. As readers who know anything about mental illness know, what helps a person doesn’t always make the most sense. In this case, it doesn’t seem clear why her father would be comforted by a bunker, but at the same time, it makes perfect sense.

Damon and his friends weren’t strangers to the woods themselves. In fact, they enjoyed the sprawling, somewhat odd, woods because of how it afforded them the chance to play “the Game.” The game was one that let them show off their masculinity. Their power. Helped them train to become tough guys and strong guys. It would be a nice means of getting them prepped were they ever to want to join the military because they’d be prepared physically — and mentally. And the day Ashlee died, she was playing the game with them as well. Except her version of the game differed from their version of the game. And the day Ashlee died, the game involved a little more partying from the boys than it did usually.

And the day Ashlee died, more secrets spilled out than ever before.

Perhaps Damon and Ashlee weren’t exclusive.

Perhaps Ashlee wasn’t a victim of Emily’s father’s hands.

Perhaps Ashlee was a victim of . . . herself.

Don’t want to be spoiled? Go ahead and skip down to the paragraph beginning with a “*.” Because from here on it, it’s all spoilers since there is a lot I want to talk about which can’t be tackled without spoiling the reveal.

As it turns out, Ashlee wasn’t killed by Emily’s father. Nor was she killed by something that Damon did. Throughout the book, we see both of their stories, and we worry about whether Damon’s being drunk and high when she died played a big role in what happened and we worry at times that Emily’s father really did commit the crime. Christopher is savvy in how she builds her evidence for both sides, and because both teens are well-voiced and their passion for answers strong, there are enough faults in logic in each of their tellings that it seems maybe what they hoped wasn’t true really is. For a long time, I bought more into Damon being responsible, though at times I saw where Emily’s father was responsible, too. This is great story crafting, and it compelled me to keep pushing forward to figure out who the responsible party really was. But better — I hoped neither of those possibilities was the actual explanation.

And neither were.

Even though we’re given a pretty big picture of the story through two sets of eyes and two perspectives, what we aren’t knowledgeable of is what ends up playing the biggest role in the resolution: we don’t know Ashlee. We know of her. We know she played the Game. We know she was Damon’s girlfriend. We know they were sexually active and involved and we know how much that mattered to Damon. But beyond that, we’re not keen on who she was or what her goals or desires were.

Until there’s a break and we learn that maybe Ashlee wasn’t entirely sympathetic. That maybe she harbored some really dark secrets. That maybe she wasn’t exactly as faithful to Damon as Damon was to her.

Because Ashlee liked attention and she liked the attention of boys who’d give it to her. Especially when those boys were playing their Game. Especially when she could get a boy alone and let him play her game.

Although it’s well-written and plays into a bigger, quite interesting, theme about emerging sexuality and experimentation with adulthood (drugs, drinking, the Game’s goals of building and bulking up), where Christopher’s story falls apart a bit for me is when we get the big Ashlee reveal. Her game was the choking game. She lived for the high of being choked and passing out. In many ways, it’s written to be equivalent in terms of a high as reaching orgasm. It was the height of pleasure and thrill for her, and that she could convince boys to do this to her, it was even more of a high to her. Ashlee’s death happened because the boy she convinced to choke her managed to hurt her more than intended — either by her or by him. Emily’s father comes into the picture when he tried to rescue her from the woods and resuscitate her. Because her father had been in the bunker and managed to figure out there was a girl he could try to save in a way that he’d failed to save when he was himself at war. This was his shot at redemption for past actions (again, handled exceptionally well knowing that this was his means of making sense of PTSD through his PTSD-suffering mind).

What seems like a logical explanation for what happened doesn’t entirely fit the voice of the story nor does it work for me in terms of the ages of the characters. The choking game is very juvenile: it’s the kind of thing teens experiment with in middle school and something that — at least in my experience — becomes a warning to kids very early on in their lives. I don’t like to self-insert when it comes to review writing and suggest my experience is universal, but I think most teens who are 16 or 17 or 18 are well beyond the point of finding the choking game the kind of rush that Ashlee might. And while Christopher does a good job of building it against the idea of sexuality, thus aging it up, I don’t necessarily buy it. I don’t want to say it felt convenient because it didn’t — the writing and storytelling allow this explanation to be right — I don’t buy it. I wonder how teens would feel about this explanation. Would it feel too juvenile to them? Or would it make sense to them and feel like it was written right at them?

* While I didn’t buy the explanation, I thought the strong writing, the compelling characters, and the pacing of this book make it a great read. It’s crafted smartly, and I loved how much want there was in this story. At no point was there a lull because every scene involved a character desperately seeking something: an answer, a resolution, a connection. There’s no saggy middle.

Like in her Stolen, Christopher gives us characters who have a lot going on internally and who struggle with their ethical and situational choices. She knows how to write moral ambiguity and that shines through. The characters grow and change their minds, and even when the explanation comes through, what resonates with The Killing Woods isn’t the “how it happened,” but instead, “how they grew.” Damon changes significantly throughout the book, and at the end, he realizes what it is he really needs to move forward. Emily discovers the depths of her father’s own illness throughout and it helps her in the end better connect with him in a way she was never able to before.

The Killing Woods will appeal to readers who loved Stolen and who love stories where nothing is quite as it seems. This is a character-driven thriller, and there’s a lot of respect paid to teenagers coming into their own. Emily and Damon aren’t necessarily characters you like as a reader, but they’re characters you come to care about because their stories are interesting and honest. Readers who loved Carrie Mesrobian’s Sex & Violence or Stephanie Kuehn’s Charm & Strange will find this an excellent next-read in terms of character and voice, as well as for their explorations of violence and sexuality and masculinity and more. Readers who liked Laurie Halse Anderson’s The Impossible Knife of Memory, especially the aspects regarding how Hayley’s father’s PTSD impacted her and her family will find this book to be complementary — there are some neat parallels between the two books. There’s more mystery to The Killing Woods, but it’s the characters who resonate (and make up for the aforementioned misstep in the “what really happened” aspect of the story).

Readers who like their realistic YA with a darker edge have been treated lately to a lot of great stuff, and Christopher’s book will further satisfy those readers.

Want your own copy of The Killing Woods? Thanks to Scholastic, I’ve got two copies to give away to a US reader. Fill out the form and I’ll pull two winners at the end of the month.