Nightshade: A Novel (U)

Fifteen-year-old Matt Moore seems to have it all: a loving mother, a caring stepfather, a host of friends, and a growing relationship with the most beautiful girl in school. All signs point to a bright future, until fate intervenes. After a sudden fire leaves Matt's senile and troubled grandmother homeless, she moves in with the family. Her ceaseless demands cause unrelieved tension - and with her comes a shameful secret about her daughters that traps Matt between a dead aunt who haunts him and his own mother, who seeks redemption for her sister's sins - and her own. Matt transforms from a gregarious teenager to a hostile loner prone to fits of rage - tortured by chilling memories and haunted by nightmares. Then a shocking tragedy shatters the family beyond repair, propelling Matt's mother and grandmother into a final, explosive confrontation...a showdown in which old wounds will be viciously torn open - and a horrific shadow from the past will spring an implacable life of its own, clawing toward Matt with the ferocious inevitability of death itself.