Stevie Bell may be Ellingham Academy's greatest teenage detective, but her boyfriend, David, is a problem she cannot reason through.
Looking for a distraction, she travels to New York with her friends, preferring a murder to cryptic texts and the memory of David with other girls in a British pub.
A body found in a Manhattan apartment complex gives her exactly that case, and it is anything but simple.
Surrounded by the messy feelings of living people, she begins to doubt human connection, asking whether magnetism is only manipulation and whether trust is possible at all.
The mystery also presses an unanswered question about how someone joins a cult before realizing it, and whether what she had with David is really over.
