Ten years after graduation, Jessica Miller has planned every detail of her triumphant return to Duquette university. 
Everyone will see who she wants them to see – confident, beautiful, indifferent. Not the girl she was before, back when Heather Shelby’s murder fractured everything.
But not everyone is ready to move on. Someone is determined to make the guilty pay. 
When Jessica and her friends are reunited, they are forced to confront not only what happened that night, but the secrets they would do anything to hide.

It’s a tribute to Ashley Winston’s storytelling ability that it’s taken me to the halfway mark to decide to set this novel aside.

The characters are well-drawn. The plot has enough twists to propel the story forward and keep the curiosity engaged. The way the two timelines (Now and Then) are spliced together keeps the Now dominant and lets the Then be endlessly unexpected. Some of the scenes are dramatic in a very cinematic way, like the scene in the Frat House basement.

So why am I setting the novel aside halfway through?

Because the people are execrable and I don’t want to spend any more time with them.

My curiosity is still engaged. I don’t know who the murderer is. I have a suspicion, which is probably wrong, but if the price of knowing the answer is to spend another 160+ pages with these folks contaminating my imagination, then it’s too high.

Given that I also set aside ‘Everyone Who Can Forgive Me Is Dead‘, I’m starting to wonder if I’m not cut out for Dark Academia novels.

So why did I make it so far through the book?

I liked the start of the book. The the-gang-meets-for-the-first-time scene, set on the campus lawn, was very nicely done with everyone introduced smoothly, clearly and plausibly. Ashley WInstead captured the dynamic of a nostalgia-in-the-making-fantasy being constructed realtime, fed by a deep longing and absorbed eagerly like rain after a drought. It was an act of collaborative self-deception that she made seem both beautiful and doomed and which filled me with hope for the book.

By the time I was a third of the way through, I was ready to set the book aside. I had no sympathy for the main character’s mania for being seen as successful by the shallow, entitled rich frat boys and sorority girls at the we-exist-to-perpetuate-privilege school she went to. I couldn’t bring myself to care about them or their secrets. I was ready to leave.

Then Ashley WInstead cranked up the plot and darkened the atmostphere and my attention snapped back. We’d left the glittering party behind and were in the grotty basement of a Frat House and the brother of the girl who was murdered ten years is saying that he has evidence that one of the golden group gathered to celebrate how successful they all are, is the murderer.

My curiosity rose on its hindlegs and demanded that I stick around for a while.

Even as the twists and turns of the plot leashed my curiosity and dragged me along, my dislike for the main character continued to grow. She’s shallow, malicious, mendacious and callous. And yet… I can see why she’s those things. She can see why she’s those things. Yet she can’t stop. Or she tells herself she can’t. That’s compelling and repulsive at the same time.

The people around her seemed just as bad and just as lost and yet I could muster no sympathy for them.

It seemed to me that Ashley Winstead was leading me on an exploration of sin as it was defined in my Catholic education: actions, omissions and thoughts that destroy grace, erode goodness, and kill the soul.

At the halfway mark, after more secrets had been revealed and more suspects implicated and the main character had come up with a new plan that was likely to power the next act of the story, I realised that I had a decision to make: should I see where the new plan took me or should I leave these people behind?

I decided to leave these unhappy eroded souls behind and read something else.