This is more than a story about a mystery. It’s a beautifully written depiction of life at a small boarding school, a microcosm in the woods. What happened there, amongst the students, was not beautiful, but the way Bodie Kane looks back on some important events, as an adult, is well expressed. Much of the novel is written to someone offstage, a character the reader will learn much more about along the way.
Bodie, a successful podcaster, has returned to the Granby School, the boarding school where she spent her vulnerable teen-aged years, for a few weeks to teach a class. When she asks her students to choose a topic to investigate for their own podcast projects, one of them expresses the interest to delve into a murder that happened at the school while Bodie was a student there, decades ago. It’s a crime for which a man named Omar is serving time, and also a controversial subject matter, since there are many people who believe the investigation was flawed, and conspiracy theories abound on social media.
Bodie is both pleased and a bit scared at the prospect of getting into this subject matter. It’s been on her mind, something about her past that won’t stay buried. In the meantime, Bodie has her own complicated life to deal with, along with resurfacing memories of the events that happened around the time of Thalia Keith’s murder.
In the years since this tragic event, society’s values have shifted and the world is very different, largely because of social media and an increased awareness of social injustices. So, the time seems to be right to look at this case again.
This is a fascinating story, and I was intrigued almost as much about the flawed perceptions
the students of the 1990s had about each other as I was about the obviously flawed
justice system. This novel does not tie things up in a neat bow, and I admire that, also.
Thank you very much to Netgalley and Penguin Group Viking for sharing this novel with me!
