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Tall Bones

Information about the book
Shame, secrets, love, lies. The gripping debut thriller from the most exciting new voice of 2021.
 
When seventeen-year-old Emma leaves her best friend Abi at a party in the woods, she believes, like most girls her age, that their lives are just beginning. Many things will happen that night, but Emma will never see her friend again.
 
Abi's disappearance cracks open the façade of the small town of Whistling Ridge, its intimate history of long-held grudges and resentment. Even within Abi's family, there are questions to be asked - of Noah, the older brother whom Abi betrayed, of Jude, the shining younger sibling who hides his battle scars, of Dolly, her mother and Samuel, her father - both in thrall to the fire and brimstone preacher who holds the entire town in his grasp. Then there is Rat, the outsider, whose presence in the town both unsettles and excites those around him.
 
Anything could happen in Whistling Ridge, this tinder box of small-town rage, and all it will take is just one spark - the truth of what really happened that night out at the Tall Bones....
 
 
 
 
 
 
EXTRACT
THE ROAR OF the bonfire is hard to distinguish from the sound of the  trailer-park boys  and  the  schoolgirls who holler  and dance in the shadow of the Tall  Bones. It is a small-town sort of night  – the  last  that  Whistling  Ridge will  see for  many years to come, although nobody knows this yet – in the kind of  town  where  coyotes  chew on stray cigarette  butts  and packs of boys go howling at the moon.
Abigail Blake turns  at the edge of the trees and  smiles at Emma.  This will be the memory of Abigail that  stays with Emma  long  after the  rest has  been  drunk  away: long  and pale as a moonbeam, flyaway red hairs curling gently in the damp air,  hands buried deep  in  her  sleeves, standing on the balls of her feet, like she might  take off r unning at any moment.
‘I’ll be fine,’ she says. Her eyes give her away, darting  ahead into  the  forest.  They are not long into September, but  fall comes quicker in the mountains, and already the early night has stolen  over the pines, their opaque shadows broken only by the beam  of a single flashlight.
‘But how  are you going to get home? ’ There’s a little dent in her brow,  Emma  thinks, just the right shape  and  size for the pad of her thumb.
 ‘Em.’ It’s as if she has to remember to smile again. ‘I’ll just call a cab or something. I’ll figure it out. Really, it’s fine.’ She looks  at the  light  hovering among the  trees and,  behind it, the vague shape of a boy. Emma follows her gaze, but it’s too dark to make him  out properly.
‘I don’t think  you should go.’
Abigail’s grin looks so tight it must hurt.  ‘It’s just fun, Em. Don’t worry about it.’
Emma  does  worry about it.  She  isn’t  tall  like  Abigail, doesn’t have the same  gap between her thighs  like all teen- age girls want; the only thing her father ever gave her was his Latino complexion, and  it  has dogged   her  all  the way through school;  she isn’t the kind  of girl boys ask to go into the woods  with them, so what would  she know? But still she shakes her head as she peers into the darkness. ‘I’ll wait here for you.’
‘No.’ Abigail takes a deep  breath and  smiles  firmly again. She smells  of her  strawberry Chapstick. ‘Come  on,  Em, let me live a little, huh?  I’ll be fine. Promise.’
Abigail Blake is seventeen and, like all girls her age, she believes  she’s  going  to  live  for  ever.  Deep  down, Emma believes  it too,  and  that  is why she leaves her  friend  there, where  the  stomped-down grass of the  field meets  the  trees, and slouches  back out past the Tall Bones to her car. The fire is still crackling away, its light snaking off the surface of those towering pale rocks. The partygoers cheer as they smash  beer cans  together and  hurl  them   on  to  the  fire,  cooing  with delight  as the flames whoosh higher  into  the dark.
Emma  doesn’t look  back. If she had, she might  have seen Abigail hesitate, hand outstretched as if perhaps, in the end, she hadn’t really expected Emma  to leave.
There is another young  man  watching her from  the other side of the bonfire. He has a wicked sort of gaze, which makes which makes Emma feel as if she’s shivering even though she isn’t. She has seen him around, lingering on the edge of town since springtime, but she knows him only by sight. A profile sharp enough to cut cocaine, dark hair brushing the collar of his worn- out leather jacket: there is something in the motion of his hips, the way he juts out his chin, that feels like he might have been a highwayman in a previous life. Evening rain has stripped back the heat of the day, and now his cigarette breath hovers in the cool air the way storm clouds do around mountain peaks. When she looks again, he is gone.
Emma feel as if she’s shivering  even though she isn’t. She has seen him around, lingering  on the edge of town since spring- time,   but  she  knows   him  only  by  sight.  A profile  sharp enough to cut cocaine,  dark  hair  brushing the collar of his 
worn-out leather  jacket: there is something in the motion of his hips, the way he juts out his 
chin, that feels like he might have been a highwayman in  a previous life. Evening rain has stripped back the heat  of the day, and now his cigarette breath hovers in the cool air the way 
storm  clouds do around mountain peaks. When she looks again, he is gone.
 
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Tall Bones          
 
by Anna Bailey
 
 
 
 
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