Secrets of the Blue Hand Girls
by Rowana Miller
High School    Sourcebooks Fire    368 pp.
10/25  Paper ed.  9781464254543    $12.99

Heathers meets Daughters of Eve in this gritty mystery debut. High school senior Kay has never fit in at Davison, an elite girls’ school on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. She’s a scholarship kid from Brooklyn with no time for drama. But when she receives a letter inviting her to join a secret society where members must dye their right hands blue, she’s curious. Especially after she learns that the group’s mission is to discover what really happened to her friend Emily, who died in a freak accident freshman year. But was it really an accident? Soon Kay and the other Blue Hand Girls are enmeshed in a corrupt plot that reaches the highest levels of the school administration. Through it all, she struggles to hang on to her romance with smart, sexy classmate Zola—except that she may be placing her trust in the wrong person. While some secondary relationships are underdeveloped, and a slow-paced first half might challenge some readers to continue, those who persevere will be rewarded with a suspenseful, showy thriller that literally ends with a bang.

From the January/February 2026 issue of The Horn Book Magazine.