Mr and Mrs Fang are performance artists. They like to make things happen and then watch the world react. Film it and it’s art. Their children are also required to participate in the performances and referred to in the completed works of “art” as Child A and Child B (Annie and Buster, conveniently.) The performances are basically things like staging a big fight, making the children pretend to be orphans playing music for coins on the street and then loudly saying how awful they are.
Now A and B are all grown up and, let’s face it, kind of messed up. They end up back at their parents’ house. One day their parents disappear. There has been a string of highway murders recently and their case fits the pattern. But Buster and Annie know their parents and are convinced that it’s another performance. Either their parents are totally nuts and messed up and inappropriate, or they’ve totally messed up their kids so that they cannot even accept a death when presented with sufficient evidence. It’s all so messed up!!! I thought this would be darkly funny and there was some humor in it, but I ended up disliking all the characters and being appalled by everything.
This was a prepub and as I’m a big fan of everything she writes I was thrilled to get my hands on this. Like most of Dessen’s other books, this features a very smart girl (Auden) who doesn’t quite fit in eventually getting together with a quirky guy. In this instance the girl is really quite brilliant and models herself after her academic mother, eschewing “normal” social activities to immerse herself in academia. Her father and mother are divorced and her father is remarried to a perky young woman named Heidi, who has just had a baby. For reasons she doesn’t quite understand herself Auden chooses to spend the summer with her father and Heidi. And of course it’s a summer in which she learns to make connections to others, has fun, and actually connects more with Heidi than with her dad. 
