The Girl with All the Gifts by M. R. Carey

The girl in this grisly story is a member of the "hungries," zombies who are driven to feed on human flesh.  Melanie is different, however.  Like the others, she is drawn to humans by their scent and is gripped with an almost uncontrollable urge to attack.  However, Melanie, though just a child, understands who she is and has desires and values that go beyond her baser instincts.   The plot revolves around a small group of survivors fleeing from an attack by another band of killers, the junkers.  Two soldiers, a "mad scientist" who wants to cut up Melanie's brain, Melanie, and a beloved teacher are struggling to work their way across lawless and dangerous terrain to reach a place of refuge.  The tension is unrelenting and the consequences for being discovered are beyond nightmarish.  I couldn't put it down.

Challenger Deep by Neal Shusterman and Deadly Design by Debra Dockter

These two exciting books deal with death-defying challenges for two teens, one who is facing a complete psychotic breakdown and the other who knows his heart is programmed to fail and he won’t live beyond his seventeenth birthday.

In Challenger Deep, Caden Bosch is becoming increasingly unstable and unpredictable. In his more cognitively aware moments he knows his parents are really his parents, that no one at school wants to kill him, but forces beyond his control have created a bizarre world driving him further and further away from his family and friends. The author draws on the experiences in his own family with his own son to describe the descent into mental illness and the process of healing.

Deadly Design takes on the idea of genetic manipulation of eggs in a fertility clinic to create seemingly perfect children. Kyle McAdams and his identical twin brother (but born 2 years earlier) are two of these children. Connor becomes a star football and basketball player, track star and honor student while Kyle lags behind--spending most of his time playing video games. Then Connor and several other astonishingly beautiful and talented teens die of heart failure upon their eighteenth birthday. After tracing all of them back to the same fertility lab, Kyle needs to figure out why they died and how he can avoid the same fate. Full of intrigue and evil scientists,

Seeker by Arwen Elys Dayton

Seeker is a nail-biter of a book, full of action, hints of romance, and agonizing moral choices as three teens, Quinn, Shinobu, and John, struggle for control of time- and place-bending powers.  Quinn and Shinobu, upon taking their oaths as seekers, discover the darker side of their new responsibilities and want nothing more to do with them.  Escape is seen as betrayal and carries its own consequences, and John's desire to restore his family's legacy ultimately threatens to destroy Quinn, even though he loves her.  Great stuff!!

The Messengers by Edward Hogan

Since her brother Johnny disappeared after injuring a policeman in a bar fight, Frances has been experiencing blackouts.  When she starts to regain consciousness,  she begins to draw.  At first the drawings are meaningless scribbles, but increasingly they have become detailed scenes containing particular people whom she has seen in town.   Then she meets Peter, who recognizes her as someone like him, a "messenger,"  doomed to create sketches of death scenes and deliver them to the people who are going to die.  If Frances refuses to pass along the drawings, someone close to her will suffer. The Messengers follows how Frances and Peter try to deal with this curse.  Creepy, thought-provoking, suspenseful.

The Impersonator by Mary Miley

Vaudeville and Prohibition in the Roaring Twenties form the setting for this murder mystery in a small town in Oregon.  A young vaudeville performer bears a striking resemblance to a missing heiress, and the heiress's devious and unscrupulous uncle plots to use Leah to impersonate Jessie Carr, who reappears on her 21st birthday to claim her inheritance.  Leah has been on stage since her childhood, so becoming Jessie is no great challenge, but what if her secret is uncovered?  She could go to jail or worse, face the same fate as Jessie, who is probably dead.  Leah, as Jessie, has to fool her aunt, cousins and grandmother while exploring the family estate and asking questions to figure out the truth before Jessie's murderer makes her his next victim.

Burn by Walter Jury and Sarah Fine

Burn takes up where Scan, the story of a boy's fight to protect his father's invention, the scanner that can tell human from alien, leaves off.  The scanner is now in the hands of the H2 (alien) forces, but the enemy needs Tate to decipher his murdered father's coded files on how to use the technology and save the planet. Burn is a rollercoaster of a book, with Tate, a teenage version of television's MacGyver, struggling to outsmart his foes while evading capture himself.  There are action scenes galore, betrayals at the highest levels in the Fifty (the humans), arson, torture, and discovery of a new, even more lethal threat to earth's survival.  Impossible to put down.  

the impossible knife of memory by Laurie Halse Anderson

High school senior Hayley Kincain lives every day on edge.  She must walk on eggshells around her father, a veteran haunted by his wartime experiences whose escape through drinking and drugs leave him moody and unstable.  Her own past has taught her to fear trusting others and caring about anything or anyone except her dad.  Then into her life comes a charming, funny, persistent and thoughtful boy who wants to be with her and make her laugh.  Can Finn bring love and thoughts of a better future to Hayley, or is he just another distraction from her full time responsibilities trying to save her father from the ravages of his PTSD?  Great story!