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3.5/5
Non-Fiction
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Rating: 3.5/5
Pages: 400 (9hr19min)
Started: 27 February 2024
Finished: 2 March 2024
Summary:
When therapist Marianna gets a call from her niece that there's been a murder at her college, Marianna's alma mater, she is plunged back into a world of academia and murder. Girls are dying, stabbed in the woods with a Euripides-quoting postcard delivered to their empty dorms after their death, and the more Marianna digs the more convinced she becomes that charming, dramatic American Professor Fosker is involved in the killings. But at an institution where romance and hatred, academia and murder, are converging, it's not easy to tell when someone is lying.
Thoughts (BIG SPOILERS):
I was enamored with the first half of this book. It was really interesting to read a book from a therapist's perspective; the constant psychoanalysis of all the characters was very engaging. Once Marianna got to her niece's school, it became even more interesting, because that therapeutic analysis was being directed into a very glamorous and dark academic environment, which is already a very fun thing to read. There were so many suspicious characters, all of whom could have been responsible for the murders; I personally was betting on a bacchanalia-type ritualistic killing involving both the professor and several of the students. The writing was engaging, and I really was on the edge of my seat.
But the end was kind of awful, for several reasons. First, the climax began with a 'group therapy session' that was horrible to have to read; Marianna was out of her depth and it was embarrassing to watch her accuse a bunch of people while they seemed to know more than she did. Secondly, the reveal itself was horrendous--the niece, groomed by Marianna's dead husband, enacted their plan and tried to kill Marianna and frame her, which was both unsatisfying (I really wanted a bacchanalia-ritual-sacrifice-caused set of murders to be the answer) and such a gross use of sexual assault and grooming. Although it was interesting for grooming and a psychiatric break to be the reasons for murders, this did not present victims of SA in a helpful light, and was frankly just a really unhinged thing for Michaelides to do, even knowing his centering of mental illness in thriller novels.
I can't entirely trash this book, because the start was so consuming and fascinating, but the end of this novel was not good, and not okay.