Dark Rooms

"The first time I saw Nica after she died was at Jamie Amory's Fourth of July party . . ."

A stunning debut about murder and glamour set in the ambiguous and claustrophobic world of an exclusive New England prep school

Death sets the plot in motion: the murder of Nica Baker, beautiful, wild, enigmatic, and only sixteen. The crime is solved, and fast—a lonely classmate, unrequited love, a suicide-note confession—but memory and instinct won't allow Nica's older sister Grace to accept the case as closed. Dropped out of college and living at home, working at the moneyed and progressive private high school from which she recently graduated, Grace becomes increasingly obsessed with identifying and punishing the real killer.

Compulsively readable, Lili Anolik's debut novel combines the haunting atmospherics of The Secret History and the hairpin plot twists of Megan Abbott's Dare Me.