Burning Blue, by Paul Griffin

Nicole is the most beautiful girl at school.  Therefore, jealousy seems like the most likely reason for the brutal assault in which half her face is burned with battery acid.  But Jay is convinced that there is more to the story.  Frustrated by the slow pace of the police investigation, Jay hacks into computer systems and pounds the pavement in classic sleuthing fashion, uncovering a truth that reaches far wider (and simultaneously far too intimately close to home) than is comfortable.

The book is billed as "a tender, haunting look at life after beauty." It isn't really.  Instead, it's really a very complicated whodunit with an extremely sloppy wrap-up (for about 240-odd pages, the story slowly rolls out, but something lit a fire under Griffin and the last fifty pages just become a messy unveiling of the real story with little-to-no effort to have it make sense).  Some heartstring-pulling at the end winds this mess up (probably that "tender" stuff in the blurb), but the characters feel neglected and unresolved.  It doesn't help that the cast of characters is vast and the story is unfocused.  Basically, it's a mess!