Dead Girls Walking

Temple Baker grew up as the daughter of the North Point Killer, a man convicted of murdering twenty people at the family's old campground and known for branding every victim. She has always believed that evil runs in her blood. One thing she never accepted was that he also killed her mother, who disappeared years ago. Then he confesses to that murder from death row.

Temple wants proof, and she wants to bury her mother at last. That sends her back to the old family property, which is now a sleepaway camp for Black LGBTQ+ teens who are interested in horror. She takes a job as a counselor, putting up with the forced togetherness of camp life because the job gets her onto the grounds.

She has barely unpacked when a body is found in the woods. It is the first of several deaths over one terrifying weekend, and each one pushes Temple closer to a question she has avoided all her life: how much of her father lives in her.

This is a horror novel with a slasher setting, a campground with a murderous past, and a mystery about a missing woman running beneath it. The action is compressed into a single weekend, so the pace stays tight and the dread builds fast. The cast is mostly teenagers and young staff, and the story keeps its focus on Temple's fear of her own inheritance.