Sandra Williams appears to be an ordinary teenager on vacation eager to hook up with an experienced diving partner, particularly one as handsome and wealthy as Bryan MacDonald. But Sandra’s invitation to the MacDonalds’ lakeside home is the calculated culmination of a scheme that has occupied her family for the past year. She and her parents have systematically hunted down the young man, and Sandra is determined to get to the bottom of a mystery that happened three decades earlier, a secret that lurks in a wrecked sloop deep below the surface of the lake.

A haunting tragedy that links the two families reveals itself bit by bit, like the pieces of the jigsaw puzzle Sandra assembles with the MacDonalds during a vicious three-day storm. As Sandra dives under the surface of the lake to learn the truth, readers are called upon to venture their own predictions about what might have happened so many years before. They must also fathom some murky ambiguities in the characters and the choices they make.

Although Uncle Greg MacDonald may be slimy by any reckoning, goodness and evil are not always so obvious in Storm Warning. Does Sandra’s pursuit of the truth justify her deception of Bryan and his sister, Amanda? Why have Sandra’s parents left her to carry out such a dangerous mission completely on her own? At what age can children be held responsible for terrible events that happen? On-the-edge suspense is sustained on every page of this tightly constructed psychological thriller. Storm Warning is yet another proof of Hughes’s remarkable versatility as a YA novelist.