Deadly Animals by Marie Tierney; 2024. Hardcover.

Finding a dead body is not normal. But Ava is not a normal teenager. Fourteen-year-old Ava Bonney has an obsessive interest in the rate at which dead animals decompose. The motorway she lives by regularly offers up roadkill, and in the dead of night, Ava likes nothing more than to pull her latest discovery into her roadside den and record her findings.

One night, she stumbles across the body of her classmate Mickey Grant, and fearing that her secret ritual could be revealed, she makes an anonymous call to the police. When Detective Seth Delahaye is given the case, Ava won't step back - not when teenagers in her sleepy South Birmingham town are going missing. How hard can it be to track a killer?

Racing alongside the police or against them, Ava is determined to figure out who is hunting her classmates before she becomes the next prey.