Category Archives: thriller

Down and Out in the River City by Wm Stage

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Down and Out in the River City, the third crime thriller by Wm Stage, is a refreshing change of pace in both setting and characters, with a strong feel of gritty reality. Contemporary society’s schisms and Americans’ careless assumptions and prejudices are on full display. This well-paced story puts St. Louis, Mo., special process server Francis Lenihan in the precarious position of having to break the law if he wants a devious serial killer to get justice. St. Louis has as many swirling currents as the mighty Mississippi flowing alongside it, and some are just as dangerous.

River City is one of the city’s many nicknames. A good bit of the action takes place in a homeless encampment that has sprung up in the riverside park surrounding the city’s most famous manmade attraction—the Gateway Arch. Stage doesn’t neglect the city’s troubled racial history, notably the 2014 death of Michael Brown by police in nearby Ferguson. That event created the backdrop of interracial resentments, fear, and anger for this story’s opening.

When Lenihan walks out of the Civil Courts Building, he finds himself in the midst of an incipient riot. A former police officer accused of murdering a 24-year-old Black man has just been acquitted. Caught up in the melee, Lenihan is rounded up with everyone else, and must sit in jail until he can be processed.

Lenihan’s views on this and other examples of racial discord are not easy to pigeonhole. He seems to be on first one side, then the other. Maybe at all times he’s simply on the side that will give him the quickest path out of it. What I particularly valued in this book is that, through Lenihan and the people he drinks with, you hear the full range of attitudes about race and social issues, for better and worse. It’s no shade of polemical.

Lenihan works for the sheriff’s office, delivering legal papers to people involved in landlord disputes, divorces, court cases, and the like. As you can imagine, although a process server has no authority to arrest people, the recipients of these notices can be unhappy to see him. Lenihan goes about his day-to-day work during the course of the story and how he works is an interesting window on a behind-the-scenes job.

The story starts in earnest when Lenihan receives a call from the father of a young murder victim. Lenihan’s business card was in the dead man’s pocket. The father wants to know more about his son’s last days and, desperate, asks Lenihan to investigate. This takes him to the homeless encampment, where Lenihan hopes to pick up the young man’s trail. There, Lenihan connects with a Black preacher named Cleo looking for his brother. Through Cleo, Lenihan meets some of the colorful characters who make the camp their home. Chasing down fragments of information of wildly varying reliability leads in a direction that threatens Lenihan himself. I liked this book a lot. The setting and characters are fresh and well-developed, and a nuanced understanding of the process server’s life grows out of author Stage’s own background as a licensed process server in St. Louis.

Victorian Psycho by Virginia Feito

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Virginia Feito’s new gothic thriller, Victorian Psycho, has attracted the attention of readers and commentators for its originality, as well as for its in-your-face macabre violence. It’s graphic. It’s bloody. And in this book, the first-person narrator is the serial killer. She doesn’t murder at a discreet distance, either. No poison here. When toward the end of this short book (190 pages) she tells you she’s holding a cleaver, well, you know . . .

It’s also worth saying that much of it is highly comic, poking fun at the aristocracy and its Victorian-era pretensions. The heroine, Winifred Notty (which I invariably read as “naughty”) is posing as a governess and was hired to deal with the two children of the Pound family: Drusilla, an angsty teenager, and the young heir, William, insufferably puffed up with his future importance.

Their mother, a faded woman imprisoned by the constraints of her social situation, is unable to think beyond them. Though she senses something off about Miss Notty, she grabs hold of the wrong end of the stick when she believes the governess is trying to seduce her husband. Mr. Pound may actually be interested in being seduced—something you justknow won’t turn out well.

You gradually assemble a sort of understanding of Winifred’s background. She was illegitimate; her father refused to marry her mother. Her mother moved to another town and passed herself off as a widow, marrying a local Reverend who grew to think of his stepdaughter as the incarnation of evil. She was sent to a girls’ school, but after The Incident (which I’ll leave you to discover on your own), she was returned home.

The foods the Pound family is served are described in sometimes lascivious detail, as the governess perceives them. But then she has something of an oral fixation—prone to biting or licking or sucking on various objects and people.

I came to think of this story as akin to a gruesome fairy tale, in which all sorts of outlandish and grotesque occurrences are possible. You must decide for yourself how much is literally true and how much is in Miss Notty’s mind. It’s gory, but good. The book is being made into a feature film, scheduled for release next year, starring Maika Monroe, Thomasin McKenzie, and Jason Isaacs.

The Seventh Floor

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Third in former CIA analyst David McCloskey’s riveting series of espionage thrillers, The Seventh Floor will grab your attention and hang onto it until the last page. Not only is the story a hair-raising exploration of international misdeeds, its underlying theme is how loyalty to friends, family, and country is tested.

In the book’s opening pages, two of the CIA’s Russian sources are dead. One had a message vital for the CIA, which he was to convey to American CIA officer Sam Joseph. Now Sam’s gone missing. The story’s protagonist is Sam’s boss and mentor Artemis Aphrodite Procter. Hard-nosed, hard-drinking, and profane, she heads the CIA unit Moscow X, a covert action program targeting Putin and his cronies,

Her unusual name was carefully crafted: Artemis (huntress) Aphrodite (love) and Procter (so similar to Proctor, someone who oversees students). The best expression of her hunting and caring sides is the row of nine stars tattooed between her shoulder blades, each representing one of her agents whose murder she’s avenged. (At CIA headquarters, in real life, a star is carved into a memorial wall for each agency officer killed in the line of duty. There are 140 of these stars, and the officers’ names are listed in an accompanying book. The names of 34 of them remain secret.)

A new CIA Director, Finn Gosford and his new staff occupy the agency’s seventh floor. He and his number two, Deborah Sweet, know Artemis and her best mates—Mac, Theo, and Gus—from their earliest days of training. Artemis and her colleagues have pegged Finn and Debs as true second-raters, and Finn and Debs hate them for it. The agency’s chief mole-hunter, named Petra, suspects this cluster of disasters may not be coincidental, but Finn and Debs refuse to investigate.

After several months of brutal interrogation and psychological torture, Sam Joseph is swapped for a Russian agent. He comes home to a very different organization. Petra and Artemis have been fired. And, in one of the most unexpected career turnarounds imaginable, she now works at a Florida alligator-themed amusement park. McCloskey is equally deft at conjuring a toxic workplace atmosphere, a dank underground cell in Moscow, and Artemis’s unsavory alligator-related tasks.

Sam visits Artemis in Florida and tells her what no one else knows. There is indeed a mole in CIA, but Sam’s Russian contact was assassinated before he could give pass on the name. With meticulous attention to tradecraft, Sam and Artemis develop a plan to identify the traitor. Risky, yeah. Worse, too close to Artemis’s inner circle.

While this action-packed story carries you along on a tidal wave of suspense, McCloskey makes his characters’ actions and choices totally plausible. Like real people, they have flaws and heroism, they’re capable of demonstrating loyalty and hiding betrayal.

This is a really good one!

Fair Haven

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Laury A. Egan’s new crime thriller, set in the suburban town of Fair Haven, dispels any notion you might have that the suburbs are dull. Fair Haven is an actual town in Monmouth County, New Jersey, and Egan grew up there, so while she describes its Jersey Shore locale with convincing authenticity, the residents’ shenanigans are, one hopes, wholly fictional.

Coincidentally, while reading this book, my husband and I found ourselves practically next door, attending the opening day of Monmouth Park Racetrack’s 2025 season. I kept glancing around at my fellow racing fans in search of doppelgangers for Egan’s lively characters! As Egan describes the area in a foreword, it’s a middle-income to wealthy year-round community with sailing, yacht clubs, the ocean, two rivers, and a rich history. Homicides, she says, are rare.

Maybe so, but she’s put a juicy one in Fair Haven. The protagonist is Chris Clarke, a professional photographer in her early 40s, who formerly worked for Monmouth County’s Forensic and Technical Services Bureau. Though she no longer works for them, the local police call her in when a staff overload leaves the Fair Haven Police with a dead body on their hands and no photographer.

The dead woman is Sally Ann Shaffer, a tennis pro at the Sycamore Country Club, who was electrocuted in her hot tub, and there is no shortage of suspects. It seems quite a few people, men and women alike, had sexual liaisons with Sally Ann. She may even have had her eye on a Roman Catholic priest, new in the community, who runs a summer tennis clinic for children of the parish.

Chris is in an intimate relationship with physical therapist Kate Morgan, and what I liked about this story is that Egan has made the sexuality of this couple and several other characters an integral part of the plot. Kate has been married and has a 14-year-old son, but one of the dilemmas she and Chris face is that the son doesn’t want to live with his mom as long as she’s with Chris. Too embarrassing.

Kate lost custody of her son in the divorce, when the judge received a letter from Sally Ann revealing that Kate is a lesbian. The hypocrisy eludes Kate’s ex-husband Harry, who drinks too much, and has been carrying on with Sally Ann for years. With justification, Kate wants their son back. Both of them end up among the several suspects in Sally Ann’s death.

There’s blackmail, thievery, fraud, assault, and more awaiting readers of this book. Although the characters engage in much antisocial behavior and hold quite a few prejudices, Chris is a likeable protagonist and remains the moral center of the story. I did feel that her old friend, Police Chief Mackie, and the department’s lead detective share more information with her than they should, but that does keep the story moving along briskly. While there are twists, they are all earned—Egan lays her groundwork well.

Gabriel’s Moon & Havoc

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Pack your traveling clothes. These two books will take you on adventures far afield.

In Gabriel’s Moon, the new espionage thriller by William Boyd, a brief prologue tells how thirty-something Gabriel Dax is haunted by the house fire that took his widowed mother’s life and destroyed his childhood home. Gabriel has become a book author and travel writer, speeding off to one destination after another, trying to outrun the flames.

Now Gabriel is in Léopoldville (Kinshasha), capital of the newly established Democratic Republic of the Congo. A friend arranges a spectacular journalistic coup: an interview with the prime minister, the controversial, pro-Soviet Patrice Lamumba—a poor political choice for a leader sitting on a “gold mine” of uranium. Gabriel works hard on the Lamumba article, but his editors spike it. Lamumba, apparently, is old news. Kidnapped in a coup.

Rumors say Lamumba is dead. His editor says that’s not true, and if it were, he’d know it. Of course, it is true, and Gabriel slides into a mirror-world of truths, half-truths, and lies, delivered most convincingly of all. Someone desperately wants his interview tapes, in which Lamumba claimed US, British, and Belgian government operatives were out to get him. He named names.

It’s an exciting read as Gabriel zooms from one assignment to the next, from one strange encounter to another, and develops the self-preservation skills he seems increasingly likely to need. The story is packed with interesting, richly developed characters. Aside from Gabriel, there’s a Spanish artist whose star is falling; a young American woman with a dubious agenda; a CIA operative who uses a minor French author for his nom de guerre; his louche, hard-drinking, and slippery contact in Cadiz; an irritating Liverpool journalist; and a dogged insurance investigator who decades earlier doubted the official story about the deadly fire.

London, Warsaw during the Cold War, Spain, the Congo—Boyd captures them all as effectively as travel writer Gabriel himself might. It’s no surprise that award-winning Scottish author Boyd’s writing is top-notch. He’s a two-time finalist for the Booker Prize.

Christopher Bollen’s protagonist in the new psychological thriller Havoc is Maggie Burkhardt, an 81-year-old widow from Milwaukee, residing at a somewhat unfashionable hotel in Luxor, Egypt. She’s lost everything—husband, daughter—and is making up for their absences by trying to become a presence in other peoples’ lives and “fixing” their problems. Truth told, she’s an interfering busybody, and you may wish she’d get her comeuppance.

Probably you won’t expect her nemesis will turn out to be an eight-year-old boy. Otto Seeber is cunning, fearless, and the orchestrator of much of the havoc that descends on the Royal Karnak Palace Hotel. (This fictional hotel was in part inspired by Luxor’s Winter Palace Hotel, where Bollen got his first notion for this story and Agatha Christie wrote part of Death on the Nile. I’ve been there myself and can attest to the loveliness of the garden with its exotic birds, a frequent meeting place for Bollen’s characters.)

Only Maggie—and her archaeologist friend Ben—see through Otto’s mask of childish innocence to the demonic personality underneath. Ben’s husband, Zachary, having a belated stirring of paternal interest, draws the boy into their circle, and Maggie cannot avoid Otto. He has her in his sights and keeps her there.

Maggie attempts to arrange situations that will prompt Otto’s mother to return with him to Paris. Her plots only succeed in drawing her deeper into a cycle of retribution from Otto. It’s a chess game between them, with a core of malevolence that has prompted comparisons to Patricia Highsmith’s writing.

Bollen’s vivid descriptions seem exactly right. Egypt is a distinctive, “romantic” place, but an unfamiliar world. The rules are different there. Things can go wrong. And do. Maggie is a completely believable, if not completely likeable character. I thought I understood her and her flaws, but in the end, Bollen has some revelations in store that may lead you to reevaluate her. In short, Havoc is a beautifully stage-managed trip to another world.

Exposure: Navajo Crime-Solving

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This is the second in Ramona Emerson’s planned trilogy about Navajo crime scene photographer Rita Todacheene, a follow-on to Shutter, her impressive debut. Exposure again takes you on an intense ridealong with Rita, who uses her camera to meticulously and unflinchingly document the most gruesome tragedies. You may believe that the images themselves suggest clues to the commission of these murders, or you can accept Rita’s understanding, that the spirits of the dead are guiding her to see beneath the surface. Either way, you know she believes those ghosts are with her. (She and another popular indigenous author, Marcie Rendon, have discussed how their cultural backgrounds give them a different, intriguing way of seeing and interpreting the world, which I wrote about a few weeks back.)

Rita’s colleagues in the Albuquerque, New Mexico, police department are less-than-thrilled with her insights. They like simple solutions and quickly closed investigations. Worse, she’s not a cop. Their hostility has led to the requirement that she undergo psychological counselling to combat her “ghosts.” (Labelling a woman crazy in order to dismiss what she says is an old, old story, of course.) To keep busy while on this furlough, she’s been working in the office of the Medical Examiner, one person unable to dismiss her so lightly.

The story opens with Rita being unexpectedly called out to a murder scene. A mother, father, and their six children have been shot to death. The police believe the oldest son, alive, blood-spattered, and holding a gun, is the culprit. The spirits of the children, one in particular, lead Rita to a different theory of the crime.

In parallel with Rita’s story, alternating chapters recount the story of a man who, in childhood, witnessed the violent deaths of his family, followed by a back-breaking and spirit-quenching ordeal at a religious orphanage. An adult now, he’s a lay Brother doing outreach among the impoverished residents of Gallup, New Mexico. He’s determined to help the indigent people he encounters—alcoholic, too little food and shelter, and too much desperation. For them, wintertime is a deadly trial, and death too often comes from exposure (another meaning of the book’s title).

Meanwhile, the dead children so torment Rita that she returns home to her grandmother, who lives on the reservation, north of Gallup. There, perhaps, she can start to heal. As the clouds over her spirit begin to lift, she’s asked by a female Gallup police detective to help figure out a set of murders in the town.

Emerson so effectively describes the starkly beautiful country and the uncompromising weather, that you may need a hot cup of something as you read. She integrates Navajo traditions and beliefs into the modern tale in a way that gives science (the medical examiner), belief (the Navajo), and procedure (the police) their due. All three come together in Rita. But they are not easily reconciled, and her struggles make for a unique and compelling story.

I’m not personally a big believer in the supernatural, but I do believe unexplainable events happen. It’s Rita’s belief in the spirits that matters, though, and they have never led her astray.

The quality and sensitivity of the writing is much to be appreciated, and it persists despite the sometimes brutal subject matter. Shutter, Emerson’s 2023 debut novel, was nominated for numerous awards in the crime and mystery field, frequently appeared on “Best Books of the Year” lists, and received recognition from both the National Book Award and PEN Literary Awards programs. A Navajo (Diné) writer and filmmaker, she lives in Albuquerque.

Relatedly, the new season of Dark Winds, based on the Tony Hillerman characters, was scheduled to start 3/9 on AMC. We watched past seasons on Amazon Prime. Looking forward to the new one!

A (Fictional) Trip to Japan

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The art, architecture, and traditions of the Land of the Rising Sun have always fascinated me, which gives the backdrops of these stories added pleasure.

The Puzzle Box by Danielle Trussoni

How you feel about puzzles will likely color your reaction to Danielle Trussoni’s new thriller, a follow-on to her well-received 2023 book, The Puzzle Master. I love puzzles, included a puzzle box in my mystery-thriller, Architect of Courage, and thought I’d found the perfect read.

Mike Brink is a New York City puzzle creator who suffered a brain injury that left him with the extremely rare “acquired savant” syndrome. Savants have extraordinary cognitive abilities in a single field. For Mike Brink, it’s solving puzzles, along with the supporting mathematics. Life and relationships aren’t easy for him and, interestingly, Mike would prefer to be less “special.”

The Imperial family has asked a US-raised young Japanese woman, Sakura Nakamoto, to convince Mike to try to open the Dragon Puzzle Box, a feat attempted in secret only every twelve years. Renowned puzzle experts have tried and failed, and failure is fatal.

In Japan, a woman named Ume is training a small cadre of young women to be warriors as ruthless as herself, female samurai. They believe whatever is hidden in the Dragon Puzzle Box can restore the samurai to power. Meanwhile, another powerful antagonist also wants the Box’s contents, in order to pursue one of those “fate of the world hangs in the balance” missions that strain my credulity. Even if Mike can open the Box without dying in the process, the dangers will be only just beginning.

I like the elements of Japanese culture that Trussoni includes in this tale. She lived several years in Japan and the story environment certainly carries the feel of authenticity. A “foreign” setting is almost always extra exciting, simply because the rules are different there, and they are very different indeed in the Imperial court setting!

The Labyrinth House Murders by Yukito Ayatsuji

No doubt Christie, Chandler, Sayers, Hammett, and their brethren would be quite comfortable reading this story, inspired by Golden Age traditions, the fourth of the author’s Bizarre House Mysteries.

The house of prominent Japanese mystery writer Miyagaki Yōtarō was constructed as a giant labyrinth (maps are helpfully provided to the guests—and readers). For his sixtieth birthday, he plans a celebration involving talented young writers he has mentored, his editor/critic Utayama Hideyuki, and mystery fan Shimada Kiyoshi.

The arriving guests meet Miyagaki’s secretary who makes the astonishing revelation that their host, dying of cancer, has committed suicide. Miyagaki’s posthumous instructions ask them not to call the police for five days and not to try to leave. He also asks the four authors to use the days to write the best detective story they can, which Utayama and Shimada will judge. The winner will receive half of Miyagaki’s considerable estate. Initially nonplussed, the writers quickly rally and commit to the project. Thus, you have a classic locked-room mystery. It doesn’t tax your imagination to guess the partygoers will begin dropping like flies.

Utayama and Shimada take the lead in investigating, but neither can be sure the other isn’t the mysterious killer. Most puzzling is that the positioning of each body and the cause of death mimics the newly deceased’s draft story.

I learned less about Japanese culture than I might have expected and quite a bit more about the personalities of ambitious authors than I might have wanted. Miyagaki well understood what he was dealing with when he set up this unusual challenge. Each murder necessitates a lengthy deconstruction of the surrounding events, the location of other guests at the probable time of the crime, and its relation to the story begun on their word processors. It begins to feel like an overlong unravelling, but all points to a classic fair-play conclusion. Will you figure it out before Utayama and Shimada do?

Don’t Go in the Water?

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One of many memorable scenes in Fredrick Forsyth’s thriller Avenger (which I’ve listened to three times!) occurs when the hero spends several days scouting the encampment of the villain and sees a stream running along the property, an obstacle he’ll have to cross to get inside. Every day, a worker comes out and throws chickens into the water, which are immediately devoured in a frothing mass of piranhas. Eeeew.

But, do piranas have a bad rap? Before you decide, or before authors enlist them to be aggressors in their fiction, you and they might check out Ronald B. Tobias’s article, “Roosevelt’s Piranhas” in the February 2025 issue of Natural History. Piranhas acquired their deadly reputation after Teddy Roosevelt made a trip to Brazil and observed piranhas devour an entire cow in minutes with their razor-sharp, blade-like teeth. What he didn’t know was that this demonstration had been carefully staged for maximum mayhem. He was “the victim of a hoax,” Tobias writes.

A few factoids: most of the 30 to 60 piranha species are vegan; a piranha can detect a drop of blood in 50 gallons of water; they keep rivers clean by “disposing of” dead or dying animals; the bite of a fully grown black piranha is, pound for pound, more powerful than that of the Tyrannosaurus rex; Latin Americans eat them to treat problems of sex drive (men) and reproduction (women); they’re banned in 27 US states, where officials worry they might escape into the wild and breed—piscine pythons.

The red-bellied piranha, called Roosevelt’s Piranha, is about a foot long and weighs three pounds. It’s not so big, but it’s the numbers that will get you. They travel in shoals that can include hundreds or even thousands of fish. For the most part, they are relatively harmless, “except for a few scary weeks of the year,” Tobias says. In the wet season, the river waters flood vast areas, where many animals live, and fish food is plentiful. As the land dries up again, all these well-fed fish are channeled back into a much shrunken area, trapping predator and prey. Once that limited food supply is gone, the fish attack each other—“the cannibal fish Roosevelt saw in Brazil.” That is definitely not the time to take a swim. As the water polo team in Wednesday Addams – Piranha Pool learned.

The March of Television

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This spring promises several new television seasons and series that should be worth watching. But first, let me praise the extremely quirky Interior Chinatown, which we’ve watched over the last few months. It’s based on a 2020 novel by Charles Yu, which won the 2020 National Book Award for Fiction. A couple of episodes in, I realized I’d actually read this book. I did not get it at all. My reaction: “Huh?”

But someone must have, and the transition to the small screen is terrific. Jimmy O. Yang plays Willis Wu, a background character in a police drama set in a fictional city. His parents, especially his mom, have some hilarious moments, as does his fellow waiter, Fatty Choi, who thrives on insulting the restaurant’s customers. The plot is essentially indescribable, but Wu is on a quest to find out what happened to his older brother, whom the TV show calls “Kung Fu Guy.” Many hilarious and heartfelt moments. Watch it on Hulu.

On TV this spring, I’m looking forward to the televised version of Liz Moore’s Long Bright River, a book I enjoyed immensely. In it, a cop who works in Philadelphia’s rough Kensington neighborhood, scene of a series of prostitute murders, never escapes the fear that one day what she’ll find is the body of her renegade sister. Amanda Seyfried plays the police officer, Mickey Fitzpatrick. Excellent family interactions in the novel; I hope they’re preserved. Coming on Peacock March 13.

Damian Lewis will reprise his role as Henry VIII in Wolf Hall: The Mirror and the Light, the third book in the late Hilary Mantel’s riveting series about Tudor political shenanigans involving the King, Thomas Cromwell (Mark Rylance), and Cardinal Wolsey (Jonathan Pryce). The books were great, and the acting in this series, first aired in 2015 as Wolf Hall, is exceptional. Wolf Hall was the ancestral home of Henry’s third wife, Jane Seymour, the one (out of eight) he presumably most loved. It’s premiering March 23 on PBS.

Another season of Dark Winds arrives March 9 on AMC. This crime series, set on Arizona’s Navajo reservation, is based on Tony Hillerman’s popular books featuring Sheriff Joe Leaphorn and his deputy Jim Chee. Leaphorn is played by Zahn McClarnon, an actor I came to admire in the Longmire series, and Chee by Kiowa Gordon. The rest of the mostly Native American cast is also strong. And you can’t beat the beautifully stark Southwestern landscape.

I’ll also give a try to the British detective drama Ludwig, which aired on the BBC in 2024, but will be available on BritBox starting March 20. The title character (played by actor-comedian David Mitchell) is a puzzle-maker, and Ludwig is his pen name. His identical twin brother (I know, I know, beware of twins) is a Cambridge police DCI who’s gone missing. Ludwig poses as his brother to get access to police information about the disappearance. He is, of course, taken for the detective, and becomes caught up in the department’s investigations. Puzzle-solving should come in handy.

Society of Lies — Hometown Thriller

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Reading a book set in your own home town is always kind of a kick, and people with a Princeton connection may want to read it for that reason alone. I enjoyed the inside references to places in the Princeton area in Lauren Ling Brown’s new thriller, but the personalities she describes don’t ring true. She makes clear that Society of Lies doesn’t reflect either real characters or social groups at Princeton University, where she did her undergraduate work, and I hope that’s true! Still, you’re forced to wonder to what extent her college experience is reflected here. Like the pair of sisters who are the novel’s main characters, and who encounter prejudice and insults, the author is Black and Asian.

Older sister Maya is visiting the campus a decade after her own graduation to witness the graduation of her sister, Naomi. The return to Princeton immediately triggers waves of memories, especially those surrounding the eating club—Sterling—where both Maya and Naomi were members. Maya also is haunted by the unexpected death of one of her friends ten years earlier. (Eating clubs—combination dining hall and social club—are a nearly 150-year-old tradition at Princeton.) Brown’s fictional Sterling Club is the elite of the elite and has a corrupt secret society at its heart. With all the positives that membership in a club like Sterling can offer, there’s always a downside. It’s tempting to misuse that influence.

This is all brought back to Maya in the story’s first chapter when, on the eve of graduation, Naomi is found drowned. The story timeline ping-pongs between Naomi’s last few months on campus, and Maya’s own university experiences. The similarities can make it hard to keep events straight, despite the clearly labeled short chapters. The extent of drinking and drug use—prescription and otherwise—may be realistic, I can’t say. But when the characters’ resulting confusion and flawed memories repeatedly lead to story red herrings, it became tiresome.

Although Brown has some surprises in store, she plays fair and provides the clues needed to back up the story’s conclusions. Although her writing style is promising, her prose is weighted down with unnecessary verbiage that makes the going seem slow. It isn’t necessary to describe characters’ emotions repeatedly, when their reactions are patently understandable. We’ve all (probably) had friends who were stuck in a romantic rut, like Naomi is with Liam, her boyfriend, ex-boyfriend, boyfriend again, ex-again, and we’ve all (probably) eventually lost patience with those friends.