When Imogene’s famous mystery-writer dad disappears without warning, her stepmother, a therapist who knows her husband’s fragile mental health history, wants to make the search public rather than relying only on police. But Imogene talks her out of it, secretly convinced that her dad has gone to search for her long-absent mother, whom Imogene knows little about. With the help of her best friend, and the friend’s college-age older brother on whom Imogene has a crush, Imogene applies everything she’s learned reading her dad’s books to find her mom, because in doing so she believes she’ll find her dad. A novel that works as genre fiction is also a coming-of-age story in which Imogene’s search leads to the agonizing, honest truth that the people we love are imperfect, sometimes even fragile. Hints of romance fizzle realistically while so much else blossoms, from Imogene’s relationship with her stepmother to her understanding of frailty and forgiveness and the expansive nature of family. Mixed-race Imogene is part Chinese American. (Age 13 and older)

The Mystery of Hollow Places is a gorgeously written, stunningly original novel of love, loss, and identity, from debut author Rebecca Podos.

All Imogene Scott knows of her mother is the bedtime story her father told her as a child. It’s the story of how her parents met: he, a forensic pathologist; she, a mysterious woman who came to identify a body. A woman who left Imogene and her father when she was a baby, a woman who was always possessed of a powerful loneliness, a woman who many referred to as “troubled waters.”

Now Imogene is seventeen, and her father, a famous author of medical mysteries, has struck out in the middle of the night and hasn’t come back. Neither Imogene’s stepmother nor the police know where he could’ve gone, but Imogene is convinced he’s looking for her mother. And she decides it’s up to her to put to use the skills she’s gleaned from a lifetime of reading her father’s books to track down a woman she’s only known in stories in order to find him and, perhaps, the answer to the question she’s carried with her for her entire life.