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An emotionally complex portrayal of secrets, loss, and grief from Dante Medema, Indies Introduce author of the Indie Next Pick title The Truth Project. 

Bailey and Vanessa shared everything: laughter, secrets, and packets of Pop Rocks to ward off bad days. But that all changed the night Vanessa left Bailey’s, headed for home, and ended up swerving off a cliff nowhere near her house. Now Bailey, who thought she knew Vanessa better than anyone in the world, is left with a million unanswered questions, and the only person with answers is gone.

To help grieve her loss, Bailey creates a chat bot of Vanessa using years’ worth of their shared text messages and emails. The more data she uploads to the bot, the more it feels like she’s really talking to her best friend. That is, until the bot starts dropping hints that there was more going on with Vanessa than Bailey realized—a secret so big, it may have contributed to Vanessa’s death.

This compelling puzzle of a story, filled with engrossing twists and turns, is written in alternating prose and text message formats. Teens will gobble up this fast-paced page-turner.

She built an AI to talk to her best friend one last time. But the bot knows more than it should.

• A High-Tech Mystery: Bailey codes an AI version of Vanessa to process her grief, but the chatbot soon becomes her only lead in a mystery she’s desperate to solve.
• An Unreliable Narrator: Built from years of texts and emails, the Vanessa-bot seems real. But as it reveals cryptic secrets, Bailey must decide if she can trust a ghost in the machine.
• Secrets and Betrayal: The closer Bailey gets to the truth about Vanessa’s accident, the more she realizes their friendship was built on secrets that someone was willing to kill for.
• Told in Texts and Prose: A fast-paced, unputdownable story that unfolds through a unique blend of narrative chapters and gripping text message exchanges.
• An Alaskan Small Town Setting: In the snowy, isolated town of Tundra Cove, everyone has something to hide, and Bailey’s investigation could expose them all.

Dante Medema is an author of books for young readers. Her debut novel, The Truth Project, was an Indies Introduce title and an Indies Next List Pick. She lives in Anchorage, Alaska, with her husband, four daughters, and a room full of alien memorabilia—and books, of course. When she’s not writing, she dabbles in baking, decorating, painting, sewing, and reading up on Enneagram personality types. To learn more about Dante, visit her online at dantemedema.com.