Six Must Die: A New Locked-Room Sapphic YA Thriller Coming Your Way March 2026
It’s official: my second YA thriller, Six Must Die, will be released with Little, Brown Books for Young Readers on March 10, 2026.
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As one of the (many) cut lines in my Six Must Die Google Docs graveyard reads: Cue confetti. Cue music. Cue dread.
The truth is, I’m simultaneously incredibly nervous and also mind-numbingly excited for y’all to read this book. Six Must Die is definitely my most ambitious project to-date. It’s a dual-timeline, locked-room, diminishing-cast, six-POV psychological-thriller-slash-murder-mystery with an unreliable narrator at the forefront that unfolds entirely over the course of an hour. It features a variety of multimedia elements, including witness testimony transcripts, court documents, newspaper articles, blog posts, text messages, yelp.com reviews, and characters that you’ll either fall in love with…or be waiting with bated breath to see die on-page. It’s Squid Game meets Until Dawn meets Killer Book Club. It’s Five Survive meets One of Us is Lying by way of Secrets Never Die. It’s an intense character study wrapped up in a campy video-game-inspired narrative, it’s every intrusive thought you’ve ever had while locked in your local escape room franchise with people you’re not entirely sure how to feel about anymore, and it’s a book that took me five years to write.
And you know what? I’m so proud of it—despite the fact that it literally tried to kill me, several times—that I cannot wait to share it with you on March 10th, 2026.
(I’m also terrified that people will hate it, of course, because I’m an author and it’s always agonizing to go from the point where you’re obsessing over your brainchild and every minute detail within it and only you, your editor, your agent, and your in-house publishing team can see your changes, to where suddenly you have to let your book go off into the world and be judged for itself. That’s an occupational hazard, though, and one I’m more than happy to put up with if it means I get to keep telling stories about grieving gay girls who must fight to survive impossible odds. Those are the stories that I think we need more than ever right now.)
The idea for this novel came to me in April 2021, before I even started querying HtFaMG. And even though I didn’t truly start drafting Six Must Die (lovingly called BREAKOUT until my publisher said “enough of that” in mid-2024 and bestowed me with a proper title) in earnest until after edits on How to Find a Missing Girl were done in late 2022, that’s still a chunk of time to go from concept to draft, and that’s because I rewrote it like a gazillion times.
Thank you, trusty Notes app, for always letting me know just how long I’ve actually been working on a single idea. (Too long, to be honest, in this case.)
I don’t even know how many drafts of Six Must Die I went through to get to the Final Draft, but I know that I have four binders full of printed hard copies that may as well be different books, and that my physical ARCs are still significantly different from the edits I just turned in during pass pages. This is the longest I’ve ever spent on a single book before. If you do the math, you’ll learn I literally spent my entire undergraduate career working on this one novel. (If you went to UNC-Chapel Hill with me, you’ll know this is true based on how much agonizing I did at any given moment when asked about how my second book was going.)
Why did it take me so long? A lot of reasons. First, the plot of Six Must Die is super complex. I kind of realized I bit off more than I could chew on a technical level halfway through pantsing the first draft, and my editor and I went back to the drawing board a lot of times throughout the process to ensure the POVs worked, that the pacing was tight, and that the lines of reasoning throughout the book made sense. This was a super arduous process, but the rigor was worth it. In my opinion, it shows on the page.
Another part of the reason that it took me so long to draft this book was that I was a full-time student for the entirety of the time I was working on it, and because I’m fully financially independent, I also juggled three additional jobs while drafting to put myself through college. This one is self-explanatory, I think. (On a personal note, I’ve since graduated with distinction from UNC-Chapel Hill and now hold degrees in Business Administration and English & Comparative Literature with Honors in Creative Writing. Slay!)
But probably the largest part of the reason that Six Must Die took me this long is something we hear a lot about in this industry: luck and timing.
Let me say this: I am super lucky for how quickly my book deals panned out. I am incredibly thankful to be in this industry and so thrilled to be living out my childhood dream every day. But timing-wise, things moving as fast as they did for me in the publishing process increased the pressure and stress put on me as a debut author who had a guaranteed deal for her sophomore novel. Did I know this would happen at the time? Definitely not! Did it still impact me in a lot of ways? Absolutely.
To be a little more transparent: Six Must Die sold alongside How to Find a Missing Girl in a two-book deal to Little, Brown Books for Young Readers back in February 2022, during my freshman year of college, and LBBFYR bought it off a one-paragraph pitch that I sent to my agent as sort of a “hey, this is what I’m planning on working on next, okay talk to you in 20 years when the slow-moving submission process is finally over thanks baiiii.”
Well. If you’ve read my other blog post where I talk about the sub process with HtFaMG, it was insanely fast. I mean like, two weeks fast. So when Six Must Die sold, I didn’t have… any of it written, actually, except for the paragraph below:
BREAKOUT is I KNOW WHAT YOU DID LAST SUMMER X ALL YOUR TWISTED SECRETS
Six friends. Six secrets. One hour to spill them, or everyone dies.
When seventeen-year-old high school senior Steffi Lockstone invites her five friends to an escape room in an attempt to save their dying friendships, she’s just happy when they all show up. But once the door locks behind them and the game begins, Steffi and her friends quickly realize they’re being held hostage by someone who knows each of their dark secrets—including the biggest one they all share—and is willing to go to any length to make them pay for it.
So then we launched into edits for How to Find a Missing Girl, and I tried to keep drafting Six Must Die throughout that process, but the HtFaMG edits took up most of my brain power. It became more difficult to juggle both projects simultaneously than I thought it would be, and I kept needing more time for Six Must Die deadlines even after HtFaMG wrapped because the writing for my sophomore novel just wasn’t where I wanted it to be.
And man, it was so difficult to go through that. I’m a perfectionist and a people-pleaser who hates letting people down, and even though my pub was so lovely about giving me extensions when I asked for them, I still felt like a Big Fraud. I started questioning if I was even cut out for this whole “being an author” thing, and it felt like even if I’d managed to get published once, I wouldn’t be able to do it again.
You always hear about the goalposts moving in this business, but it’s so real, y’all. The only thing that mattered to me became finishing my sophomore book and finishing it well. I pulled more all-nighters massaging this germ of an idea into something viable than I ever did studying for my ECON finals, until the inciting incident morphed into a memory-loss-addled, newly Czech-American Steffi Zamekova insisting to herself that she didn’t invite her ex-friends to BREAKOUT Escape Rooms INC. after-hours… right?
This book is so twisty, y’all. It’s fun, too, despite all the challenges I faced while writing it, and I’m truly looking forward to it being out in the world. (I’m also super excited to draft more books without juggling Canvas assignments with publishing deadlines. Imagine!)
Anyways, now that you have all of that background, please allow me to officially present: Six Must Die!
Perfect for fans of Karen M. McManus’s The Cousins and I Know What You Did Last Summer, this propulsive thriller follows a fractured group of friends as they fight to survive a killer escape room in rural Tennessee.
Twelve months ago, an escape room fire took everything from Steffi Zamekova. In just one hour, she lost it all: her popular blog, her close-knit inner circle, and her memories of the night that killed one of the group’s own… the charismatic (if infuriating) Matt Cesari.
On the anniversary of the bewildering tragedy, Steffi is still desperate to piece together what went wrong. So when she receives an ominous invitation in the mail summoning her to the new escape room across town, she seizes the chance for answers.
Reunited with her former friends, Steffi sees the game as a last chance to uncover the truth behind Matt’s death. But it’s soon clear that each participant has their own cagey reasons for accepting the challenge. And as tensions rise and the players are picked off one by one, it’s a race against the clock for Steffi to uncover their secrets and unlock her own memories before the game’s mastermind ensures that no one escapes the room alive.
Well, there you have it! If you’re an author and want to blurb it, please reach out to me because we’re currently looking for blurbers. If you’re a bookish influencer or friend and you want to read it early in exchange for an honest review, contact me via my contact form or Instagram DM and I’ll hook you up. And if you want to pre-order it now to make sure you don’t miss it when it releases on March 10, 2026, Barnes & Noble is currently having a 25% off sale with the code PREORDER25. The sale is for members-only, but becoming a member is free.
You can pre-order Six Must Die for 25% off from now until July 11th here.
Lastly, it’s important to me to tell you that Six Must Die is, at its core, a friendship breakup story. It’s about loss and grieving and how difficult it is to lose the people in your life who once meant so much to you as you get older, and the different ways in which we grapple with that loss. It’s inspired by (and in many ways, borne out of) the emotional pain of losing my own high school friend group.
And if you’ve ever experienced something similar, then this book is for you, too. ❤︎ ⋆˙⟡
