Dangerous Lies by Becca Fitzpatrick

by:  Becca Fitzpatrick
published by:  Simon and Schuster
publish date:  November 10, 2015

Stella Gordon is not her real name. Thunder Basin, Nebraska, is not her real home. This is not her real life.  After witnessing a lethal crime, Stella Gordon is sent to the middle of nowhere for her own safety before she testifies against the man she saw kill her mother’s drug dealer.

But Stella was about to start her senior year with the boyfriend she loves. How can she be pulled away from the only life she knows and expected to start a new one in Nebraska? Stella chafes at her protection and is rude to everyone she meets. She’s not planning on staying long, so why be friendly? Then she meets Chet Falconer and it becomes harder to keep her guard up, even as her guilt about having to lie to him grows.

This was one of those books I was curious to read, but I was also a little wary about as well.  It seemed like maybe it was going to be a little too angsty.  It seemed like Stella was going to be a brat and I was going to hate her.

Stella is raised in New Jersey by her mother who is a major druggie.  But she's an upper middle class kinda drug user, the kind that's in and out of rehab and mixed up with organized crime.  All this culminates one night when Stella finds her mother's drug dealer dead in their house.  So, she goes in to Witness Protection and her mother goes back to rehab.  She gets sent to Nebraska to spend the summer with a foster mother that's a former cop that has as much baggage as she does.  Then Stella, finds that living in Nebraska away from her old life isn't as bad as she expected it to be.

I ended up really liking this book.  Stella wasn't as bad as I expected her to be.  Yeah, she was a moody teenager, but I live with 3 of them so I'm kind of used to their attitudes now.  I really liked all the other characters in this book.  It was a really exciting read and I'd definitely recommend it to the YA/NA readers.