By Megan Andres, Grand Rapids Public Library, Seymour Branch

In February, 2004, three criminals sit together at a courthouse. They decide to play an innocent game: name three people you would kill if you knew you couldn’t be caught. Then the twist: they exchange lists.

Mariah Stewart’s Dead Wrong is the beginning of a four-book series which tells the tale of this horrid game and the lives threatened by it. In this first book, Mara Douglas is a child advocate for the Lyndon courthouse. She stands for those who have no voice: the abused, the neglected, and the lost. One of her cases has earned her a place in the game. The prize: her death.

When someone begins killing women in Lyndon, the police and the FBI get involved. What truly haunts them is that all the women so far have one similarity: their name is M. Douglas. Mara finds herself saddled with a former FBI agent as a bodyguard because her own sister, another FBI agent, fears something bigger.

As events unfold and two more die, Mara makes the connection. Once upon a time Mara advocated in court on behalf of the Giordino children. She helped their mother Diana take them away from their father Vincent. Vincent didn’t like that idea and decided that if he couldn’t have them no one would. In jail for murdering his family, Vinnie also happens to have played that game in the courthouse. And the man who took his list is after Mara.

Dead Wrong is full of twists and turns. It is both romance and thriller, genres that Mariah Stewart blends convincingly. But what may be the Dead Wrong‘s best promise is that there are still two more lists out there with two more killers waiting.