10 new YA novels to make your holidays bright this December

Reputation – Sara Shepard

No, this is not the Taylor Swift album. It’s the new novel from Sara Shepard, the author behind the Pretty Little Liars and The Lying Game series. So, you know that it’s automatically going to be a twisty, exciting story full of suspense and complicated characters.

In Reputation, a tight-knit college town scrambles for answers when an e-mail hack reveals life-changing secrets and scandals. After 40,000 emails are dumped into a public database, scandals, secrets and affairs are revealed. But the scandals turn to murder when Kit Manning’s husband is found dead. Her sister, Willa, back home for the funeral, vows to discover what happened.

But her search for the truth reveals that the residents of her hometown have a lot more to hide than just their salacious emails. How far will they go to keep their secrets hidden?

The publisher’s synopsis offers a bit more detail.

"Aldrich University is rocked to its core when a hacker dumps 40,000 people’s e-mails—the entire faculty, staff, students, alums—onto an easily searchable database. Rumors and affairs immediately leak, but things turn explosive when Kit Manning’s handsome husband, Dr. Greg Strasser, is found murdered. Kit’s sister, Willa, returns for the funeral, setting foot in a hometown she fled fifteen years ago, after a night she wishes she could forget. As an investigative reporter, Willa knows something isn’t right about the night Greg was killed, and she’s determined to find the truth. What she doesn’t expect is that everyone has something to hide. And with a killer on the loose, Willa and Kit must figure out who killed Greg before someone else is murdered. Told from multiple points of view, Reputation is full of twists, turns, and shocking reveals. It’s a story of intrigue, sabotage, and the secrets we keep—and how far we go to keep them hidden."

Reputation is available now.