When Lightning Strikes

After a lightning strike gives her unusual powers, a teen uses them to find missing children in this fast-paced first book in the Vanished paranormal thriller series from New York Times bestselling author Meg Cabot (previously published as the 1-800-Where-R-You series).

High school sophomore Jess Mastriani is used to defying expectations—in a bad way if you ask her mom, in an unavoidable way if you ask her. In her stiflingly small Indiana hometown, those who conform can pass unnoticed, but Jess’s quick temper and irreverence for rules have her getting into fights with the football team, logging much more detention time than advisable, and clashing with authority figures.

But she gets more trouble than she bargained for when a simple decision to walk home from school leads to her getting caught in a thunderstorm and struck by lightning. Jess has no apparent injuries—only a star-shaped scar—but after her accident, she starts having vivid visions of the locations of missing people after seeing their photos. When she tests her intuition by calling in anonymous tips, every one of her flashes of insight turns out to be true.

Before long, her paranormal abilities have Jess and her family under scrutiny from both gossipy neighbors and sinister federal agents, and she discovers even the people she locates can be harmed by her psychic gift when a “missing” person is returned to an unsafe home life.

When Jess gets assigned a new kind of detention—one at a hush-hush military base—she has to muster all her trouble-making instincts to rescue herself and the people she unwittingly endangered. Can lightning strike twice?