May 25, 2015
Kirman’s debut novel artfully toys with the complexities of deception, loyalty, and friendship as three Ivy League students and a professor become prime suspects in the murder of a student at their school, Julie Patel. Awash in flashbacks and memories, Julie’s classmates recall their own histories and the events leading up to her murder. Beautiful, spoiled Georgia Calvin was embroiled in a clandestine and hastily terminated affair with Harvard professor Rufus Storrow, a man with a military past and a disdain for the kind of disrespectful interruptions that Julie made in class. Elitist Charlie Flournoy admired Storrow and became smitten with Georgia, yet he never got any further than her flirtations. And then there’s Alice Kovac, the emotional tinderbox who had a curiously affectionate friendship with Georgia. With firm ties to the victim and the suspects alike, Storrow is at the center of all the melodramatic developments—and is a shifty candidate for Julie’s murderer. In focused yet perhaps overly descriptive prose, Kirman describes the messy decade following Julie’s murder and the ways it impacted the lives and loves of all three students. Though correlations to Donna Tartt’s classic The Secret History seem inevitable, Kirman’s complex, serpentine yarn has teeth of its own, and it will find a welcome home in many beach bags this summer.