A New York Times bestseller! Twin Peaks meets Riverdale in this twisty atmospheric mystery from the critically acclaimed author of A Lite Too Bright, Samuel Miller, about the search for a missing girl at an elite prep school.
Everyone knows Emma. Neesha’s her best friend, Aiden’s her basketball star boyfriend, and Evan’s her shadow, following Emma’s every move.
Emma stands out, which is hard to do at Redemption Prep, a school where every student has been handpicked to attend its remote campus in the forest of Utah. So when she goes missing in plain sight during mass, everyone notices.
And everyone becomes a suspect, especially at a school with so many rules: Don’t skip mass. Don’t break curfew. Don’t go into the woods.
Emma’s disappearance ignites an investigation, and Neesha, Aiden, and Evan all want to find her—for different reasons. But they each have their own secrets to hide, and not everyone wants Emma to be found.
As the search continues, the students start to realize that they’re not the only ones trying to hide something. Redemption Prep has secrets, too—secrets bigger than any of the students could have imagined, and Emma could be the key to finding out the truth . . . if anyone can find her.
- Multiple POV: Told from the perspectives of Neesha, the loyal best friend; Aiden, the basketball star boyfriend; and Evan, the obsessive outsider. Each one has a reason to find her—and a secret to hide.
- Elite Prep School: Welcome to Redemption Prep, a remote campus deep in the Utah forest where every student is exceptional, and the rules are everything. Especially the one about not going into the woods.
- Dark Academia: A gripping atmosphere of ambition, rivalry, and conspiracy hangs over the school, where the search for Emma reveals that the institution itself has the darkest secrets of all.
- Twisty Plot: Everyone is a suspect after Emma vanishes from mass in plain sight. But as the investigation deepens, the biggest question isn’t who took Emma, but what she was running from.
Samuel Miller is a novelist and screenwriter; made in Vermillion, South Dakota, based in Las Vegas, Nevada. He is the author of Dark Parts of the Universe, which earned several starred reviews, Redemption Prep, a New York Times and Indie Bestseller, and A Lite Too Bright, which was translated into four languages and released in eight countries. He has written television shows for Netflix, MGM/Amazon, and The CW. He has also written and produced two feature films, including Smudge the Blades, which premiered in 2026 at the Toronto International Film Festival. Sam wrote his first novel in a fifteen-passenger van while on tour with his alt-rock band, Paradise Fears. In addition to writing, he enjoys playing catch with his three-year-old son and working to dismantle capitalist systems of power. You can find him online at samuelmillerbooks.com.
