Wednesday, November 30, 2022

The It Girl

The It Girl

by Ruth Ware
Scout Press, 2022. 422 pages. Mystery 

April Clarke-Cliveden was the first person Hannah Jones met at Oxford. Vivacious, bright, occasionally vicious, and the ultimate It girl, she quickly pulled Hannah into her dazzling orbit. Together, they cultivated a group of devoted and inseparable friends -- Will, Hugh, Ryan, and Emily -- during their first term. By the end of the year, April was dead. Now, a decade later, Hannah and Will are expecting their first child, and the man convicted of killing April, former Oxford porter John Neville, has died in prison. Hannah is relieved to have finally put the past behind her, but her world is rocked when a young journalist comes knocking and presents new evidence that Neville may have been innocent. As Hannah reconnects with old friends and delves deeper into the mystery of April's death, she realizes that the friends she thought she knew all have something to hide ... including a murder.

Ruth Ware’s mysteries, like The Woman in Cabin 10 and One by One, consistently earn rave reviews for a reason. Her Agatha Christie-esque plots, modern settings, and class commentary weave together into a who done it that will truly leave you guessing. Ware’s vivid characters each have unique backstories, personalities, and motives, and there were a few I both suspected and connected with enough to desperately hope weren’t guilty. A great pick for thriller and mystery fans, narrated perfectly in audiobook form by Imogen Church.


If you like The It Girl, you might also like:

The Club
by Lloyd Ellery
Harper, 2022. 320 pages. Fiction 

Envisioned as a luxurious home-away-from-home for Very Important People, The Home Group is a collection of celebrity members clubs dotted across the globe where the rich and famous can party hard and then crash out in its five-star suites, far from the prying eyes of fans and the media. But behind the scenes, tensions are at breaking point. As tempers fray and behavior worsens, as things get more sinister by the hour and the body count piles up, some of Home's members begin to wish they'd never RSVP'd at all. 



Survive the Night
by Riley Sager 
Dutton, 2021. 336 pages. Mystery 

It's November 1991. Nirvana's in the tape deck, George H. W. Bush is in the White House, and movie-obsessed college student Charlie Jordan is in a car with a man who might be a serial killer. Josh Baxter, the man behind the wheel, is a virtual stranger to Charlie. They met at the campus ride board, each looking to share the long drive home to Ohio. Both have good reasons for wanting to get away. For Charlie, it's guilt and grief over the shocking murder of her best friend, who became the third victim of the man known as the Campus Killer. For Josh, it's to help care for his sick father--or so he says. The longer she sits in the passenger seat, the more Charlie notices there's something suspicious about Josh, from the holes in his story about his father to how he doesn't want her to see inside the trunk. As they travel an empty, twisty highway in the dead of night, an increasingly anxious Charlie begins to think she's sharing a car with the Campus Killer.

SGR

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