An artfully ripped-from-the-headlines tale of college girls studying in Italy, Abroad is a riveting story about the intersection between jealousy and friendship.

Taz, an Irish girl studying in the ancient Etruscan town of Grifonia, spends her first weeks wandering around the city, lonely and lost. When she’s taken in by a group of Brits who, while not particularly kind, always seem to have money and find adventure, Taz is flattered. She spends more and more of her time with the self-named “B4,” who insist on buying her clothes and taking her to exclusive parties.

Taz’s American roommate, Claire, senses the girls are no good and warns Taz. But Taz, who’s never been part of an in-crowd, can’t bring herself to break it off, and things sour further when Taz and Claire fall for the same man. Their once-simple friendship hurtles toward an inevitable conclusion.

Abroad is gorgeously written, with a steady drumbeat of dread infusing every page. Loosely inspired by the Amanda Knox case, it is astonishingly self-assured and perfectly paced without ever taking on a whiff of tabloid sensationalism. Author Katie Crouch (Girls in Trucks) captures the intoxicating—and sometimes dangerous—freedom of being a young student with seemingly limitless choices.

This article was originally published in the July 2014 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

The Truth About the Harry Quebert Affair, by Swiss author Joel Dicker, may not tell the truth about anything, so prepare to feel cleverly fooled and marvelously misled while reading this skillful, humorous, multilayered dissection of honesty, fame, misperception, obsession and murder.

In 1975 a teenage girl goes missing in a small town in New Hampshire. In 2008 her long-buried body is discovered on well-known novelist Harry Quebert’s property, and Harry is arrested. Harry’s former student and longtime friend, Marcus Goldman, also a best-selling novelist, is currently suffering from writer’s block. He comes to New Hampshire to support his friend and to try to unravel the crime (and maybe write a new bestseller in the process).

Marcus has discovered that he’s been able to create an illusion of excellence around his accomplishments: “All that was needed was to distort the way others perceived me; in the end, everything was a question of appearances.” This powerful theme runs throughout the book, as readers must choose among a plethora of surface appearances and decide what may lie beneath. A letter is posted; a manuscript moves from person to person; bruises bloom on a woman’s body; a black Chevrolet Monte Carlo whisks on and off the scene; a couple make plans to meet and run away together. None of these actions have a one-dimensional explanation. Rather than peeling away the story’s layers, each element becomes another viewpoint to confuse or betray.

What is the real truth about the Harry Quebert affair? This contemporary yet classic whodunit puts readers through the wringer—it’s a brainteaser par excellence. Succeeding chapters, cleverly reverse-numbered, offer ever more plausible scenarios for events that occurred in the summer of 1975, as revisited through official reports, eyewitness accounts and excerpts from the novels embedded in this tale. Events are presented as fact, and then appear chapters later in a totally different light, contradicting what came before. What’s behind Harry’s Lolita-like infatuation? Is Nola actually sweet and innocent? Are the police concealing evidence? What motivates Luther, the troubled chauffeur?

All this could get to be a bit much. But sit back, read Harry’s 31 rules for writers, and decide for yourself the truth behind this clever, confounding affair.

The fun of reading Dutch author Herman Koch is his constant questioning of normal human behavior. His commentary on etiquette and the trappings of wealth is hilariously biting; it’s like standing next to the cynical party guest who keeps you laughing all night by mocking the pretentious host. And just like that funny guy at the party, Koch can go from companionable to creepy before you realize what changed. He did it in his stateside breakout book, The Dinner, when a simple meal turned twisted, and Summer House with Swimming Pool is no different: We watch as a happy family vacation grows complicated and dark.

This time, our misanthropic narrator is Marc, doctor to the stars. His patients are artists, writers and actors who are co-dependent more than anything else, relying on Marc’s reassurance and attention more than his medical opinion. He spends his time counting the minutes until his patients leave and yawning his way through their performances. He’s not disillusioned by wealth so much as utterly bored by it.

Or is he? One of Marc’s patients is Ralph Meier, a big, hulking actor who seems to get whatever he wants. The good doctor is both repulsed and intrigued by Ralph, and he’s obsessed with learning what makes him tick—to the point of borderline stalking the actor’s family on their summer vacation.

Koch has assembled all the elements for a good summer thriller, but his style is a bit unsettling. Just when you begin to connect with the characters, he zooms wide and you lose focus. It’s fun to peek inside the windows of the rich, but it’s frustrating to be kept outside, and these characters never really let you in. They’re always hiding something, and just like in The Dinner, the real mystery here is the human condition. Summer House with Swimming Pool describes a world where hopelessly damaged people live perfect-looking lives, where all is not as it seems, and where the shadows overtake the sunshine. One thing’s for sure—Koch is not afraid to take us to the dark side.

This article was originally published in the June 2014 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Rafe Solmes is a Bath, England, literature professor who has just finished a book on fairy tales, but his interest in gruesome stories like “Bluebeard” and “The True Bride” is far from academic. When Clarissa, a university assistant, lets him walk her home one night, she discovers a sinister side to this seemingly harmless scholar. An obsessive master manipulator who won’t take no for an answer, Rafe is soon everywhere she is—lurking outside her apartment at all hours, sending increasingly threatening gifts and even turning her friends against her. 

Clarissa’s life is quickly consumed by the need to predict his next move. Then she’s selected to serve as a juror on a seven-week court case. In the jury box, she finds refuge from Rafe’s attentions, but the trial brings its own terrors. The victim’s testimony—she was kidnapped and raped as payback for a drug deal gone bad—offers a frightening premonition of Clarissa’s own future if she can’t escape her pursuer. As the trial plays out, the defense attorneys methodically pick apart the victim’s credibility, recasting her ordeal as a willing exchange of sex for drugs. Clarissa learns a chilling lesson: “That’s what happens when you press charges, when you complain. They just rape you up there all over again and say you’re a prostitute.”

Clarissa delays going to the police, even as her plight becomes more urgent. The Book of You, like many a fairy tale, features a heroine who’s naturally timid and mild-mannered. But as the weeks pass, this seemingly passive protagonist realizes she must act to save her own life, and she decides to bring Rafe down by finding out the truth about his past.

Clarissa’s burgeoning romance with a hunky fellow jurist provides a narrative bright spot. Still, The Book of You is a frighteningly intimate—and accurate—portrayal of stalking. Through Clarissa’s eyes, we see the ragged nerves, sleepless nights and paranoia brought about by Rafe’s “romantic” obsession. First-time author Claire Kendal draws readers into a taut, compulsively readable tale of pursuit and escape.

Are beginnings all that discernible from endings? Or do events and memories just pile up and bleed together, leaving one to question how things ended up that way?

In Jan Elizabeth Watson’s second novel, What Has Become of You, Vera Lundy faces just these questions. She is a seemingly accomplished woman—a Princeton grad with 40 years of wisdom—but she is wavering through life. Having recently broken off an engagement and job-hopping for the past decade, Vera has nothing to call her own but a sparse 32-page true-crime manuscript about a killer who impacted her hometown. Hoping to gain some stability, she accepts a long-term substitution position at an all-girl preparatory school in the small town of Dorset, Maine, which is recovering from its own recent murder of a young girl.

Vera sympathizes with Jensen Willard, the school’s outcast, who is equipped with a fierce intellect and a penchant for the macabre. The dark-humored girl reminds Vera of her younger self and the problems she faced growing up, and the two form a small bond. Jensen is a proficient writer—even by prep-school standards—and the intensity of Jensen’s personal essays engrosses Vera, pulling her down the rabbit hole. Soon the darkness within Jensen’s journals become more than a 15-year-old girl blowing of steam, begging the question of how far she will go to refine her craft.

The storyline is sporadic at times, creating more questions than answers, which ultimately works in Watson’s favor and leaves the reader guessing until the very end. Even if the plot leaves something to be desired, stylistically the book soars with smart, well-structured sentences that tantalize the literary senses. This entertaining tale of psychological suspense is perfect for a reader dipping his or her toe into the thriller genre for the first time.