Friend or Foe: 6 YA Thrillers About Friendship

A modern twist on the Golden Age mysteries of Agatha Christie, The Agathas starts off with the disappearance, and then reappearance, of Alice Ogilvie. After getting dumped by her basketball star boyfriend Steve, Alice disappeared for five days and then came back, refusing to talk about where she went and what happened. Then, Steve’s new girlfriend, and Alice’s ex-best friend, Brooke, disappears as well, but Brooke doesn’t come back. Armed with the complete works of Agatha Christie and the motivation of a hefty reward for information about what happened to Brooke, Alice becomes determined to solve the mystery of Brooke’s murder with the help of her new friend Iris, a less popular girl from her school who has become Alice’s tutor. 

Claudia isn’t sure what’s worse: that her best friend Monday Charles never showed up to the first day of school or that no one but her seems to care that Monday is missing. When she can’t get answers from Monday’s family about where she is, Claudia takes matters into her own hands. With a narrative that jumps between before and after Monday’s disappearance, this thriller explores the story of a missing child and what happens when the adults around you can’t be trusted. 

Beginning at a post-prom party at a lake house, this thriller is a perfect choice to dive into for a chilling start to your summer. When Claire wakes up from what was supposed to be a fun weekend, she’s alone on a hiking trail, covered in blood, and her friends Kat and Jesse are missing. As Claire begins to untangle what happened that night, she’ll find out that everyone in her friend group has secrets to hide and reasons to keep her from finding out the truth.

When Loren includes her in a Blackfeet Giveaway to honor her missing sister, Mara thinks maybe she’ll start to make friends with the other teens on the Blackfeet reservation. Instead, another Giveaway participant, Samantha White Tail, is found dead, and the four remaining participants, Mara, Loren, Brody, and Eli, find themselves swept up in the investigation of her death. Each of the four has their own complicated connection to Samantha and their own perspective to lend to the story, which is told from multiple points of view. 

Nancy Luo is already horrified by the death of her former best friend, Jamie Ruan, but then an anonymous gossip app called The Proctor starts spreading a rumor that Nancy and her friends killed Jamie. Nancy, Krystal, Akil, and Alexander are all hiding dark secrets and it seems like The Proctor knows, and is threatening to expose them to the whole school. As Nancy looks further into Jamie’s death, she realizes that she’s not the only one with something to hide, and starts to wonder which of her friends she can trust as she sets out to track down Jamie’s killer and unmask The Proctor.

Eden Stafford has grown up avoiding Fairport Village, the abandoned beach resort at the edge of town that was once the site of a brutal murder and then the further deaths of two students who went to investigate. When she agrees to go to a party at Fairport, she is less scared of the ruins than she is of the other attendees who have spent years tormenting her, especially her classmate Caleb Durham. When another student turns up dead, Eden must decide whether to trust Caleb and his friends and band together to stop the suspicious figure they saw that night from killing again.