Suspense

The bitchiness we loved in Dial A for Aunties is back with a vengeance. This time, the author takes us, via flashbacks, to the nervous, early days of an American student at Oxford University. Jane Morgan’s mother has drilled into her daughter that she can’t write and can’t do anything else right either, and Oxford isn’t for the likes of her. So it’s a relief when Janemeets the confident, beautiful Thalia Ashcroft. For Jane, it’s obsession, if not love, at first sight. She’ll do anything to keep Thalia’s friendship, and is desperate to keep her from Ami, a blithely rich student who looks like competition for friendship with Thalia. It’s a struggle—everything’s so hard for Jane, who must continually remind herself that her sociopathic behaviors—“antisocial (check), hostile (check), irresponsible (check)”—must be kept under wraps if she’s to get ahead. Then everything unravels, a situation hinted at in the present-day section of the book as the time Jane left Oxford after an unnamed disaster. What happened, and how the women confront each other and the event’s aftermath all these years later, is a thrilling tale filled with twists, unreliable narrators, and absurdness of the best kind. For Dial A for Aunties fans and anyone who likes a friendship drama.

A toxic workplace implodes as Jacobs (Always the First to Die) puts deception and its fallout under the microscope. The workplace, which darkly echoes the setting of the recent Netflix series The Chair, is North Carolina’s Dorrance University, but more specifically a six-person project within its psychology department. A professor and five graduate students, who embody the worst of what happens when coworkers see one another as family, are conducting an odd experiment. They fool students into thinking they are missing credits and must participate in an (unknown to them, mock) psychology study to graduate. The real purpose of the interaction is to gauge how willing students will be to lie when under pressure. That deception is just the beginning of the lies and manipulations that emerge in this story after one of the too tightly knit group is murdered, with further violence not far behind. Jacobs succeeds wonderfully in portraying a hothouse-type atmosphere in which everyone’s a suspect and the suspicions are just the latest inspiration for backbiting, accusations, and pettiness. Readers won’t see the ending coming and will relish the red herrings and twists along the way.