Ellery (and, to a lesser extent, her twin brother, Ezra) is a character driven by family trauma—namely, the high-school disappearance of her aunt Sarah. Sarah’s life and disappearance hang over the family like a lingering shadow, and Ellery longs to understand what happened and to connect with her mother and grandmother through this understanding. As a result, she’s obsessed with true crime as a genre, and when she finds herself in the middle of a mystery, her plucky nature and desire for justice lead her to investigate the town of Echo Ridge. It’s her hope that in doing this, she can provide a kind of symbolic healing for her family, even if she will never learn what happened to Sarah.

Ellery is, in many ways, a typical heroine for a young-adult thriller: She’s smart and attractive, but awkward, with a penchant for getting herself in trouble. She’s also naturally suspicious, and the majority of characters in the novel spend some time in her sights as potential murderers. She has a strained relationship with her mother, and most of her actions in the story can be read through this lens: She values the truth because she’s been denied it by her mother.