Teenager Kylene has a lot on her plate. Her father, once a respected FBI agent, is in prison for a crime Ky believes he didn’t commit. Her mother left the family when it all went down and moved cross-country with her new flame. In order to stay close to the prison where her father is incarcerated, Ky moves in with her grandfather instead of following her mother. Unfortunately, this also means returning to the high school she left two years ago after someone took topless photos of her without her permission while she was drunk and shared them with the entire student body. Ky thinks her boyfriend at the time is the guilty party, but she can’t be entirely sure. She’s determined to solve both crimes: the one that put her father away and the one perpetrated against her.

I got a strong Veronica Mars vibe from Natusch’s story. The violation Ky experienced feels similar to what Veronica went through, though Veronica’s rape is certainly much worse. Still, the slut-shaming and lack of action by local law enforcement are issues that Ky and Veronica had in common. And of course, such things happen frequently in real life, too.

Like Veronica, Ky is always ready with a witty comeback, fiercely loyal to her friends, and can’t help but get caught up in other people’s business. She’s the first and only person to take action when she sees local bully Donovan beating up his girlfriend in front of the whole school, which puts her on his shit list. This is a very bad thing, because Donovan is a very scary dude. He’s caught up in other shady things, too, like a doctor writing fraudulent prescriptions for steroids to help the high school football team win. It’s unclear until the very end of the book if and how these various threads – the FBI frame job, the photos, the steroid business – connect to each other, and Natusch does a good job keeping readers guessing. The climax is unsurprising in some ways, but very surprising in others, and it will have readers’ hearts pounding. It’s violent (but not gratuitously so) and terrifying, with Ky coming face to face with a killer and no one around to help but herself.

I loved Ky’s relationship with her friends in this book. Natusch does a great job showing the platonic relationship between Ky and Garrett, her longest friend, as well as Ky’s new and deepening friendship with Tabby. As an unstoppable threesome, they’re a joy to read about. The mysteries themselves are more uneven. The steroid plot feels tired, though Natusch does throw a twist into it at the very end that remains unexplored (not a loose end, but fodder for future books). Ky obtains a few small clues about the case against her father, but this seems like it’s going to be the Big Story that stretches across multiple books and is only fully resolved in the final one. The mystery of who took the photos of Ky without her consent is the only one that is solved completely, and the culprit is not exactly a surprise. Still, Natusch juggles all of these plot threads pretty well and kept me interested the entire way.

I like to read mysteries as audiobooks; it prevents me from skipping to the end to find out whodunit, an unfortunate tendency of mine. Narrator Vanessa Moyen is not my favorite, though. She voices Ky well, but her male voices sound almost comical, and her other female voices are all too high-pitched and whiny. Of course, this is a matter of taste for each individual listener. Hand this title (in any format) to teen mystery fans. They won’t be disappointed.