Hide, the first novel for adults from award-winning YA horror writer Kiersten White (Mind Games), offers thrills and chills in equal measure as 14 strivers and misfits attempt to survive a week in an abandoned theme park. Ever since surviving her father's massacre of her entire family by hiding in a pantry, Mack Black has known how to stay out of sight. This is how she knows she has a shot of winning the eccentric and high-paying hide-and-seek competition an athletics brand is hosting in the rusted-out, weed-choked Amazement Park. But as Mack and the 13 other hiders commence with the challenge, it isn't just the monsters from Mack's own past that she'll have to face to make it out alive.
From the jump, Hide excels at balancing fast-paced plotting with precise character development, centering Mack while still delving into the lives and emotions of all 14 participants. Just as Mack begins to dread learning who has been "caught" at the end of each day, readers will squirm as they wait to learn who among their favorites remain. Yet White's canny vision of a deadly game that pits millennials against each other and the self-indulgent families that oversee the game's completion has more on its mind than just delivering shiver-inducing horror spectacles (although it does that, too). White's atmospherically raw and psychologically complex portrayal of this sweat-inducing, muscle-clenching game engrosses readers without ever losing sight of the dark truth lurking beneath the surface: when it comes to facing the sins of the past, long-awaited reckonings make no exceptions. --Alice Martin, freelance writer and editor