Pest

High school senior Hallie Mayhew spends her days traipsing from one lavish Montecito estate to the next . . . spraying ant poison.

Between her dad’s pest control company, her mom’s pond cleaning service and her side gig at Caddysnack (Santa Barbara’s premier small plates and minigolf destination) Hal puts the “work” in working class. But Hal has qualms about gassing gophers. She’s tired of ditching friends to skim dead fish from fountains. And she’s freaking weary of divorced-parent politics. So Hal has a plan: win the prestigious Verhaag Scholarship, go to an east coast school, never come back.

But the Verhaag Scholarship has a proud history of nepotism and a last-minute contender just crawled out of the woodwork. Hal’s parking lot nemesis usurps Yearbook Committee, depriving Hal of her only extracurricular credit. Her Montecito clients are in a defensive frenzy over a rash of estate burglaries and, if her jobs keep making her tardy, she may not even graduate. To salvage her scholarship, Hal needs the help of Spencer Salazar, the dim, infuriating (and kinda hot) rich kid next door. To save her college prospects, she must restore the natural order of Yearbook Committee. To preserve her graduation eligibility, she needs a happy first period history teacher. And, ideally, she’ll avoid death by doberman. Now, in her non-existent spare time, Hal is adding private eye, matchmaker, and rat commando to her list of side gigs and wondering—maybe too late—if she misjudged the boy next door.

Elizabeth Foscue grew up in northwest Florida and the British Virgin Islands. She attended the University of Florida, where she majored in Linguistics and fleeing town on football weekends. She met her (now) husband at a sailing team meeting the second week of school and it was his idea to move to Annapolis, Maryland. She earned a J.D. and LL.M. from Georgetown University Law Center before escaping to SoCal after ten years of nasty, mid-Atlantic weather. Elizabeth lives in Santa Barbara, California with her husband, norrbottenspets (that’s Swedish for “barking fur-factory”) and two awesome kiddos.