Burning Blue: Chapters 43–55

by Paul Griffin
A beautiful girl in a wealthy New Jersey town is burned in a shocking attack. When hacker Jay Nazarro decides to investigate, he uncovers a long list of possible suspects.

Here are links to our lists for the novel: Chapters 1–15, Chapters 16–29, Chapters 30–42, Chapters 43–55

Here are links to our lists for Adrift by Paul Griffin.
40 words 17 learners

Learn words with Flashcards and other activities

Definition First
Print Flashcards

Other learning activities

Answer a few questions about each word. Use this to prep for your next quiz! Compete with other teams in real time to see who answers the most questions correctly! Test your spelling acumen. Read the definition, listen to the word and try spelling it!

Teaching tools

Create and assign quizzes to your students to test their vocabulary. Assign learning activities including Practice, Vocabulary Jams and Spelling Bees to your students, and monitor their progress in real-time.

Full list of words from this list:

words only definitions & notes
  1. snippet
    a small piece of anything
    Cheap-framed sketches, ranging from really good to great, all pencil, mostly people, lots of self-portraits, snippets of her trying to grin her way through the everyday.
  2. rummage
    search haphazardly
    What was I doing in this sociopath’s bedroom, in her mind, rummaging through her dreams, her nightmares?
  3. interrogation
    formal systematic questioning
    The precinct interrogation room looked more like file storage, browning manila folders everywhere, lots of unsolved cases.
  4. surveillance
    close observation of a person or group
    We had that house under surveillance with remote cameras from the buildings across the street.
  5. warrant
    a judicial writ commanding police to perform specified acts
    Search warrant in hand, the cops were sure to be on their way to my apartment, my laptops.
  6. concurrent
    occurring or operating at the same time
    I’ll petition the DA to go full out on you in court, no concurrent sentencing. You could do twenty-five to life.
  7. ostensibly
    from appearances alone
    We were up in her room, at her desk, ostensibly to cram for her home school chem test.
  8. seizure
    a sudden attack characterized by spasms or convulsions
    The swelling in my brain went away a couple of weeks later, and then they came on fast. The seizures.
  9. archaic
    so extremely old as seeming to belong to an earlier period
    I was on one of our archaic computers, checking to see if BJ’s online had an item we had sold out of in the store
  10. dupe
    fool or hoax
    I was disgusted with myself for having let her dupe me.
  11. quandary
    state of uncertainty in a choice between unfavorable options
    My quandary: Do I tell Nicole that Dave was cheating on her?
  12. symmetry
    balance among the parts of something
    Or that maybe it’ll disgust me? The lack of symmetry?
  13. cliche
    a trite or obvious remark
    People say it all the time: The world was a better place with her in it. You dismiss it as a cliché, but the problem is it’s true.
  14. compassion
    a deep awareness of and sympathy for another's suffering
    “Offer her compassion, Jay. She just lost a daughter.”
  15. elaborate
    marked by complexity and richness of detail
    Her arms were a mess, lots of scars, cigarette burns. One of them was elaborate, a pentangle.
  16. deem
    judge or regard in a particular way
    Look, my lawyer tells me that in like a week the shrinks will have gotten together and deemed me nuts, and I’ll be whisked to a psych center for four years.
  17. morals
    motivation based on ideas of right and wrong
    Unbelievable, right? A psycho with morals.
  18. foreclosure
    proceedings initiated to repossess the collateral for a loan
    Registered as Joe Smith of Hopper Lane someplace in Florida. That checked out to be an unoccupied HUD-owned foreclosure.
  19. appealing
    able to attract interest or draw favorable attention
    “Second, the idea of helping you halve your sentence and getting you back out and at large on the street two years earlier? Not terribly appealing.”
  20. incriminate
    suggest that someone is guilty
    The cops had her laptop, and she wouldn’t have kept anything incriminating on that drive anyway.
  21. void
    an empty area or space
    I spent the rest of that Tuesday night throwing darts into the void, setting up my laptop to shoot endless combinations of usernames and passwords into iCloud and the thousands of other digital storage warehouses.
  22. crevasse
    a deep fissure
    The car practically bottomed out in a pothole that was more of a crevasse.
  23. saline
    an isotonic solution of sodium chloride and distilled water
    I took the saline IV out myself, got dressed, and we just walked out, no problem.
  24. regatta
    a series of boat races
    “Pete says there’s a regatta going on. We could watch the boats, catch some fresh air, the sunset, grab dinner after?”
  25. implicate
    bring into intimate and incriminating connection
    You get implicated in burning Nicole?
  26. obstruct
    hinder or prevent the progress or accomplishment of
    Maybe that’s what your essay could be about: How I learned about obstruction of justice by obstructing it.
  27. compile
    get or gather together
    Angela had compiled a series of Nicole’s journal entries with lines highlighted here and there.
  28. emulate
    strive to equal or match, especially by imitating
    My father had a lot of artist’s prints, limited edition copies approved and signed by the artist of the masterwork they emulated.
  29. immaculate
    completely neat and clean
    The basement was immaculate, and that made it creepier for some reason.
  30. acronym
    a word formed from the initial letters of several words
    “It’s an acronym for a painting, my mother’s favorite, my destiny.”
  31. debut
    the act of beginning something new
    Her dreams of living life as an artist had been ripped from her that night of her debut when the doubt stared her in the face
  32. cope
    come to terms with
    Nicole had just come back from a month’s stay at an in-treatment center for teens coping with self-injury impulses.
  33. stalking
    the act of following prey stealthily
    The stalking died down after a couple of weeks of my not saying anything.
  34. motto
    a favorite saying of a sect or political group
    “You’re leaders, and we’re all depending on you to lead with kindness. What’s our motto?”
  35. relapse
    go back to bad behavior
    She relapsed with the cutting, but this time she reached out to me about it.
  36. proxy
    a person authorized to act for another
    She was putting together her final report on the Recluse case for a study Princeton was doing on near-filicide as it relates to child abuse by proxy syndrome.
  37. commission
    place an order for
    After Detective Barrone informed Angela that Mrs. Castro was the mysterious patron who had commissioned the attack, Angela testified that Girl Before a Mirror just blew her away.
  38. unrelenting
    never-ceasing
    Angela had an unrelenting thirst to absorb the beauty around her and desperately tried to make it her own.
  39. ignorant
    unaware because of a lack of relevant information
    This was the only association the two women had, and Angela truly must have been ignorant of the fact that her mysterious benefactor was also her victim’s mother.
  40. pedicure
    professional care for the feet and toenails
    They agreed quitting was the right call, because, per Nicole, “The shoes were murder on your pedicure,” and, per Cherry, “Picking leotard wedgies out of your butt crack in front of the boy dancers was a total drag.”
Created on Thu Jan 22 21:17:24 EST 2015 (updated Mon Sep 10 15:55:52 EDT 2018)

Sign up now (it’s free!)

Whether you’re a teacher or a learner, Vocabulary.com can put you or your class on the path to systematic vocabulary improvement.