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When 18-year-old Mae offers to pack up her sister Inez’s apartment, she has an ulterior motive. Inez, an art-history master’s student, has been missing for seven months; Mae is sure the police missed evidence. With her Tunisian parents’ reluctant blessing, Mae makes the three-hour trip, only to find someone else in Inez’s apartment: Dev, Inez’s Indian American neighbor, who claims to be watering her plants. Together, they search the apartment, finding a hidden journal that details the history of a particular white painting—and contains an enigmatic clue: “the answer lies in darkness.” The obsessiveness of this journal worries Mae, especially when they find the painting in the closet with a business card for a Boston art dealer. This leads them to prior owners of the painting—who also mysteriously disappeared. Metoui doles out the history of the painting slowly, intensifying the unease with interludes that track the painting, and the malevolent presence that accompanies it, through time. Mae’s dogged need to discover the truth fuels this suspenseful paranormal thriller about selfish greed, leading to an ambivalent but thought-provoking ending.

Kirkus
Copyright © Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

A girl’s search for her missing sister peels back a deeper mystery. Inez moved to Brooklyn five years ago to get her master’s in art history, but she’s been missing since December, and now it’s July. Eighteen-year-old Mae has volunteered to pack up Inez’s apartment, and so their Tunisian immigrant parents give Mae their car for the three-hour drive to New York from their small-town Pennsylvania home. When Mae arrives, she’s surprised to encounter Indian American Dev, the neighbor boy who’s ostensibly watering the dead plants in her sister’s studio. For his part, Dev is surprised to learn that Inez has a sister. What other secrets might Inez have kept? As she searches the apartment, Mae comes upon an 1891 first edition of The Picture of Dorian Gray, Inez’s diary hidden under the floorboards, and, in the back of a closet, an all-white painting like the one Inez has been researching, along with a business card for a Boston art dealer. Mae is sure this painting is somehow connected to her sister’s disappearance, and Dev offers to help with her search. He’s attractive, and he knows a side of Inez that Mae doesn’t, so she agrees. Still, he’s not exactly forthcoming with information, giving her half answers rather than complete truths. Masterfully written, this is a deceptively charming horror story that also skillfully weaves in romance, sacrifice, and heartbreak. Thrilling intrigue that leverages desperation and deception in almost equal measures. (Paranormal romance. 14-18) Copyright © Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Publishers Weekly
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Eighteen-year-old Mae Mansour is the only person who believes that her disappeared older sister Inez is still alive. Seizing the opportunity to escape her overbearing parents, Mae drives from rural Pennsylvania to clean out her sister’s Brooklyn apartment. There, she meets Inez’s charming neighbor Dev, who offers to help Mae investigate Inez’s vanishing. As they scour the apartment for clues, Mae finds a painting—entirely white except for a tantalizing curl of paint peeling from the corner—and a notebook detailing the work’s sordid history. Unwilling to let this lead slip away, Mae and Dev embark on an impromptu road trip to solve the mystery of the painting, during which they become embroiled in a sinister paranormal plot whose origin spans decades. Metoui (A Guide to the Dark) wields frequent flashbacks rendered in sensorial prose to craft a tightly paced thriller that deftly touches on issues of forced cultural assimilation and parental pressure. Though the ending may leave readers with more questions than answers, Metoui delivers a tale of love, obsession, and betrayal that’s a wild ride from start to finish. Mae’s parents are from Tunisia; Dev is of Indian descent. Ages 14–up. Agent: Jennifer March Soloway, Andrea Brown Literary. (July)