Hello! The inspiration for the Emancipated books came from a day I spent driving around LA with fellow young adult author, Michael Grant. We wondered what kind of crimes a bunch of innocent, generally law-abiding emancipated teenagers might get unwittingly caught up in.
At one point we toyed with the idea of putting a teenage serial killer in the mix but we decided it was too unlikely. What interested us was the idea of getting the Emancipated teens involved in a shared crime which they would then have to own up to or cover up, and to see how far each character would go on that journey.
In that sense you could say that the British movies Shallow Grave and The Beach inspired Emancipated.