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A Beautiful Family
A Mystery Novel by Jennifer Trevelyan
Subgenres:
- Historical Fiction,
- Coming-of-Age,
- Family Drama
This book is for you if you're into...
- Child detectives untangling dark secrets in 1980s New Zealand
- Sibling bonds tested by family secrets and small-town mysteries
- Nostalgic summer settings with a creeping sense of danger
From Little Stack
This exquisite debut is one of my top reads of 2025. Set in New Zealand in 1985 it follows Alix, who has arrived at the beach with her family for their annual summer holiday. But her parents are distracted and her sister is more interested in boys, leaving Alix feeling alone until she meets Kahu who tells her about a young girl who went missing from the area two years ago. They decide to investigate, uncovering secrets they wish they’d never found.
Nostalgic, moving and achingly human, this gorgeous slice of life story packs a strong emotional punch. An ideal summer read for those who like a bit of mystery in their historical fiction.
Over the course of one sunbaked summer vacation, a family is pulled into a web of mysteries that the younger daughter sets out to solve. A tense, page-turning debut of childhood, innocence, and evil.
At ten years old, she catches more than her parents and older sister suspect. Over their summer break, her mother plans to finish her novel, her father wants to grill and watch cricket, and her fifteen-year-old sister hopes to catch the eye of a local lifeguard. With everyone around her distracted, she teams up with a new friend to solve a mystery that haunts this vacation community: they'll close the case of what happened to Charlotte, a child who was presumed drowned two years earlier.
But things aren't quite as they seem, and as the children look for clues, they inadvertently dislodge information they wish they'd never uncovered. Are her parents happy together? Is her sister putting her trust in the wrong people? Is their vacation rental as safe as it seems? And when someone else goes missing, the family find themselves at the center of an urgent police investigation.
Debut novelist Jennifer Trevelyan viscerally captures the confusion and frustration of childhood, the fraught but unshakeable bond between sisters, and the dangers that lurk in the white lies we tell--especially about the people we love most.
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