Lying in the Deep

An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC, New York First published in the United States of America by Razorbill, an imprint of Penguin Random House LLC, 2023 Copyright © 2023 by Temple Hill Publishing Penguin supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin to continue to publish books for every reader. Razorbill & colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC. The Penguin colophon is a registered trademark of Penguin Books Limited. Visit us online at penguinrandomhouse.com. library of congress cataloging-in-publication data Names: Urban, Diana, author. Title: Lying in the deep / Diana Urban. Description: New York : Razorbill, 2023. | Audience: Ages 14 years and up. | Summary: When her boyfriend leaves her for her best friend, Jade joins a semester long cruise program unaware that the two are also onboard, and when her ex-boyfriend is murdered and his new girlfriend goes missing, Jade must dig into her shipmates’ lives to find the murderer and clear her name. Identifiers: LCCN 2022051331 (print) | LCCN 2022051332 (ebook) | ISBN 9780593527603 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780593527610 (epub) Subjects: CYAC: Cruise ships—Fiction. | Murder—Fiction. | Missing persons—Fiction. | LCGFT: Detective and mystery fiction. | Novels. Classification: LCC PZ7.1.U73 Ly 2023 (print) | LCC PZ7.1.U73 (ebook) | DDC [Fic]—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022051331 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022051332 ISBN 9780593527603 (hardcover) ISBN 9780593696040 (international edition) ISBN 9780593527610 (ebook) Cover photo of porthole © 2023 by Arcangel/Miguel Sobreira Other stock photos courtesy of shutterstock.com Cover design by Kristin Boyle Design by Tony Sahara, adapted for ebook by Michelle Quintero This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real places are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and events are products of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or places or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental. The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content. pid_prh_6.0_143320646_c0_r0 For Grandma Gloria /\ /\ 0 0 >o< Prologue NOW I didn’t realize there’d be this much blood. Yeah, he’d said there was blood all over the room. But I thought of how my mother would always huff and say things like “Oh, Jade, you got ice cream all over yourself.” I’d glance down, expecting to be covered in chocolate goo, and there’d be this one lone dribble trailing down my shirt. Everyone always exaggerated these kinds of things. But nope. Not this time. This time, there was literally blood all over the room. A sea breeze rustled the curtains hanging from the wide-open French balcony doors, and even though I’d just been out on the top deck, I shivered, goose bumps coating my arms like a rash. I took another step into the suite to get a closer look, still gripping the cabin doorframe as though it could anchor me to a reality in which my best friend was still alive. Well, ex–best friend. That ship had sailed months ago. Red slashed the ruffled white sheets, most of the blood pooled on the left side of the bed, like that’s where it started. Like that’s where she’d been stabbed. Smears of it angled off to the right, toward the balcony—had she been dragged?—and there were even some maroon flecks on the ornate opaque room divider at the foot of the bed, separating the bedroom from a small living room THREE WEEKS EARLIER Oh, for crying out loud. I could count the number of times I’d ever left California on one hand, and now here I was in the bustling port in Amsterdam, waiting to embark on Campus on Board, surrounded by chattering classmates, aka potential new friends, about to set sail on the greatest adventure of my life for an entire semester, daydreaming about murder again. There was no stopping it. Every time there was the tiniest lull in my day, my mind would snap to vengeance. Murderous vengeance. It was getting exhausting, honestly. It’d been two months since the love of my life, Silas, dumped me for my best friend, Lainey. Via text message, no less. He’d been spending the summer interning at her dad’s pharmaceutical company in Boston, and yeah, putting an entire country between me and them might strike you as a recipe for disaster. But I never in a million years imagined it’d end that way, let alone at all. Silas and I had fallen in love at first sight, like that cheesy stuff that happens in the movies, but real. It happened the first Friday of freshman year, when my new roommate, Lainey, dragged me to a frat party, wild and wicked, determined to break my lifelong sobriety streak. We’d been clutching red Solo cups filled with God-knew-what in the corner of some packed living room