She thought she could put the past to rest. She thought it would lead her to answers. For the past three years, Grace Blakely has been desperate to find out the truth about her mothers murder. I have a feeling that Grace didn’t see it coming, either. New York Times bestselling author Ally Carter returns with the third entry in this runaway series. So much of the evidence she thinks she had on the Scarred Man has been explained. She has blackouts and sits and rocks for hours, so neither Grace nor the reader knows for sure. Now, with good cause, everyone thinks she is crazy, including Grace herself. She later learns that what she thought was a gun was actually a cellphone. She leaps from the balcony onto his back, injuring herself. She is on the upper balcony when she sees him make his way to the stage where the president sits, and she sees a gun in his hand. president and his wife visit the embassy, Grace is sure the Scarred Man is going to kill him. Grace follows him to dark places and overhears him talking about killing someone. Grace and her friends set up surveillance on the Scarred Man. They don’t know that she’s positively identified four scarred men as the killer in the last three years, with no results. She makes new friends, and when they hear her story, they offer to help. Her grandfather knows the man and will not listen to Grace’s accusations, so she sets out to investigate on her own. Shortly after she arrives at the embassy, she sees the Scarred Man. Grace was there, and she saw a man with a scar on his face shoot her mother. She is 16, and for the past three years she has been in and out of mental hospitals after her mother was killed in a fire. Grace Blakely has come to live with her grandfather, a U.S. Oklahoma native Ally Carter, a New York Times best-selling author of the “Gallagher Girls” and “Heist Society” mystery series for teen readers, is back with the first volume in her Embassy Row series.

“All Fall Down - Embassy Row” by Ally Carter (Scholastic Press, 320 pages, in stores)

An embassy row novel