Dark Rooms: A Novel

"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. The Secret History meets Sharp Objects in this 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 quicklya lonely classmate, unrequited love, a suicide note confessionbut memory and instinct wont allow Nicas older sister, Grace, to accept the case as closed. Dropping out of college and living at home, working at the moneyed and progressive private high school in Hartford, Connecticut, from which she recently graduated, Grace becomes increasingly obsessed with identifying and punishing the real killer. Compulsively readable, Lili Anoliks debut novel combines the verbal dexterity of Marisha Pessls Special Topic in Calamity Physics and the haunting atmospherics and hairpin plot twists of Megan Abbotts Dare Me. "Death sets the plot in motion: the murder of Nica Baker, beautiful, wild, enigmatic, and only sixteen. The crime is solved, and quickly--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. Dropping out of college and living at home, working at the moneyed and progressive private high school in Hartford, Connecticut, from which she recently graduated, Grace becomes increasingly obsessed with identifying and punishing the real killer"-- provided by publisher Unable to come to terms with her wild teen sister's murder, Grace drops out of college and takes a job at the privileged and progressive prep school she once attended to identify and exact revenge on the killer