Event Recap: Killing Sadie by Rachel Peterson

On August 2nd, The Bookloft hosted a soft launch of Killing Sadie by Rachel Peterson, moderated by Natalie D. Richards. Rachel opened by talking about what it meant to finally hold the book in her hands, a lifelong dream made real, which we all felt (maybe no one more than her parents, who sat right behind me!). Killing Sadie is a dark and twisty YA thriller built around a barn party (a formative Ohio youth experience, I learned) that goes catastrophically wrong, and the conversation that followed was as layered as the book itself!

Killing Sadie

by Rachel Peterson
Published by: Simon Pulse
on August 4, 2026
Bookshop
Goodreads

Perfect for fans of How to Survive Your Murder and Dead Girls Can’t Tell Secrets, this young adult thriller unspools the truth behind a tragic murder through multiple unreliable narrators who all have secrets to keep.
Here’s what we do know: there was another infamous barn party at the McClain family farm last night, and things went horribly wrong. By the end of the night, there were two dead bodies in the old barn: seventeen-year-old Sadie Cooper and her killer, Mason Vreeland. The murder was heartbreakingly witnessed by Sadie’s twin sister, Jayne, and Sadie died in her arms. Mason was killed by Sadie’s boyfriend, Ben, in an attempt to save Sadie.
Aside from figuring out Mason’s motive, it should be an open and shut case.
But it’s not.
The story unfolds just after the murders, and Jayne, Ben, and Sadie’s best friend, Liz, are telling the cops what transpired at the party and the events leading up to it. But little details don’t match. And those little details start to add up to big discrepancies. But who’s lying, and why?
The shocking truth is revealed in the third act, when the POV shifts to victim Sadie herself, in the days leading up to the party. Witness exactly what happened—and see if you can piece it all together. Because poor Sadie totally missed what was right in front of her.

Event Recap

Killing Sadie uses prose, flashbacks, letters, and a series of interrogations, all taking place in a confined environment. Rachel talked about that structural choice directly. In a small, claustrophobic setting where the reader cannot escape to a new location, the layered formats keep the pacing from getting stuck. One of the most interesting things Rachel said was that the central question is not who is lying. Everyone is lying. The real question is why. That tells you about what kind of thriller this is, less about the mystery of the event and more about the people inside it. Natalie and Rachel spoke in length about crafting such a narrative.

Natalie walked the audience through the difference between a plotter and a pantser, describing what a plotter looks like in practice. As she did, Rachel’s mom, who was in the audience, burst out laughing. She also described herself as not a detail-oriented person by nature, which got a laugh, because Killing Sadie is meticulous. Her approach was to know exactly how the book ended and then work backward to figure out how to get there. The details had to be airtight even when finding them did not come naturally. She credited her editor highly in the process!

Writing multiple POVs was the challenge Rachel came back to most (btw there are 5 narrators for this audiobook). Getting two teenage girl protagonists to feel distinct inside the same event required giving them genuinely different backstories rather than just different personalities. She also builds playlists for her characters, which landed immediately with everyone in the room who has ever made a reading playlist. The twin trope came up and Rachel made a point of saying her twins are not written as opposites, which is the default mode for most twin narratives.

The hardest part of writing Killing Sadie was the romance. Most of the book is thriller and murder, and making the romance land inside that required a completely different gear. She also realized midway through that the parents in the book would have been in high school in the 2000s (which means that many of us reading this could be the parents…yikes haha), not the 80s, which reoriented some of her reference points for who those characters actually are.

Killing Sadie is out now!