Mortal Remains

Award-winning picture book author-illustrator Mary Ann Fraser makes her YA fiction debut with Mortal Remains. Mary Ann has written and/or illustrated over 60 books for young readers. Mary Ann's books have been Junior Library Guild Selections, and have been awarded Book Links Book of the Year, IRA Young Readers Choice Award, and American Booksellers' "Pick of the List." She is a long-standing member of SCBWI as well as one of its Regional Advisors, and a founding member of the Children's Authors Network.

Though her classmates call her Morticia and Ghoul Girl, Cally actually likes her work at the family mortuary--the dead are good listeners, and they don't judge. Then, after a mysterious explosion burns down a neighborhood house long the source of weird stories, Cally and her friends poke around in the debris and come across the hatch to an underground vault. Inside, they find an injured teenage boy who has been trapped there for days. He has little memory of his life before the explosion and speaks in an odd, stilted manner that suggests limited interaction with the outside world. Yet the boy, Adam, feels there is something familiar about Cally--and Cally must admit that she feels a strange connection to him as well. Could Adam be the boy who, years ago, protected her from the bullying of a gang of neighborhood kids? But when she finds out that boy died shortly after their encounter, she realizes Adam couldn't be him ... could he? Where did Adam come from, anyway? And, most importantly, why was he kept prisoner by his own father?