Jackal

Liz Rocher returns to Johnstown, Pennsylvania, for her best friend's wedding, five days in the rust belt town she has spent years avoiding. At the reception, the bride's young daughter Caroline disappears from the woods behind the venue. She leaves behind only a scrap of white fabric soaked in blood.

The disappearance forces up a memory Liz has buried since high school. Years earlier, her classmate Keisha Woodson, the lone other Black student in their grade, disappeared into those same woods. She was later found with her heart cut from her chest.

Searching for Caroline, Liz learns the woods have been taking Black girls for decades. The town's police and papers wrote the cases off as runaways. A local folktale gives the killer a shape, a creature people call the jackal, and Liz has to decide whether an old story might be true.

Adams's first novel opens as a missing-persons investigation, then turns into horror once the thing in the trees proves real. It draws on the town's own history too, the 1889 Johnstown flood and a 1923 expulsion of its Black residents. It was named a finalist for best first novel by the Bram Stoker Awards, and picked up an Edgar Award nomination as well.