A car crash takes the life of a promising student in a small town. The community is ripped apart when they learn the two survivors waited before calling for help in Twenty-Seven Minutes, a hypnotic debut mystery by Ashley Tate.
Becca and siblings Phoebe and Grant were on their way home from a party. Grant swerved to avoid something in the road and crashed through a guardrail. Phoebe gets the worst of it: she's thrown from the vehicle upon impact. Twenty-seven minutes pass before the other two call for help. Neither Becca nor Grant can explain why they waited. The cops know Phoebe died because of the inaction of the other two, but they don't fully investigate.
Ten years pass. The town has tried to move on from the tragedy, despite the unspoken grudges and rumors that still linger among the locals. Then Grant's mother decides to hold a memorial for her beloved daughter. Attention-seeking Becca decides she's done covering for ungrateful Grant, who is haunted by Phoebe. Out of nowhere, another teenager--someone who disappeared the same night as the crash that took Phoebe's life--appears in town, threatening to tell everyone what really happened during those missing 27 minutes.
Tate so perfectly captures the dynamics of small-town life that it is hard to believe that she grew up in downtown Toronto. She presents all the heartache and disappointment of dashed hopes and unfulfilled dreams in this story of how multiple lives can be ruined in a manner of minutes. --Paul Dinh-McCrillis, freelance reviewer