I bought this novel last year some time, and then it languished (same old story). I have moved my TBR to a more obvious place and I am hoping that encourages me to read them.
Here’s the blurb …
A successful film professor and podcaster, Bodie Kane is content to forget her past—the family tragedy that marred her adolescence, her four largely miserable years at a New Hampshire boarding school, and the murder of her former roommate, Thalia Keith, in the spring of their senior year. Though the circumstances surrounding Thalia’s death and the conviction of the school’s athletic trainer, Omar Evans, are hotly debated online, Bodie prefers—needs—to let sleeping dogs lie.
But when the Granby School invites her back to teach a course, Bodie is inexorably drawn to the case and its increasingly apparent ?aws. In their rush to convict Omar, did the school and the police overlook other suspects? Is the real killer still out there? As she falls down the very rabbit hole she was so determined to avoid, Bodie begins to wonder if she wasn’t as much of an outsider at Granby as she’d thought—if, perhaps, back in 1995, she knew something that might have held the key to solving the case.
I preferred part one to part two, in fact, part two dragged a bit for me (although there were still surprises). This was a very clever literary crime novel – a young victim, several possible suspects, is an innocent man in gaol? It’s also a boarding school story, and a story about outsiders, plus it comments on the vulnerability of women.
The characters were well-written, and the plot was very believable.
Here are some quotes
Research has always been my happy place. It might be related to my sometime collecting of facts about my peers, an attempt to feel safer by mapping the world.
I have to resist the urge to self-mythologise, to paint my own journey as harder than everyone else’s just so I can give myself credit for getting out.
And then Thalia dies – the way her body had been mangled – the way she had been tossed in the water – the way every girls was just a body to be used, to be discarded – the way that if you had a body, they could grab you – if you had a body, they could destroy you –
A review