ONLY IF YOU'RE LUCKY

A first-year college student accepts an invitation to leave her dormitory and move into a house with three other women. Then absolutely everything goes wrong.

In truth, it’s been a while since things were right for Margot, an Outer Banks native who followed her childhood friend Eliza Jefferson in applying to South Carolina’s Rutledge College, only to have Eliza die the summer after their high school graduation. Margot’s overachieving parents wanted her to go to Duke. Determined to honor Eliza’s memory, however, she instead goes to Rutledge, where nothing much happens until Lucy Sharpe casts a knowing eye over her. Lucy lives in an outbuilding on the grounds of the Kappa Nu fraternity, and she’s sure that Margot would provide the perfect addition to her other housemates. Sloane Peters and Nicole Clausen, the housemates in question, are less certain and less impressed by the newcomer. But strong-willed Lucy carries all before her until Levi Butler, a Kappa Nu legacy who’s pledged the fraternity, is found dead with Lucy’s blood on his clothes. Detective Frank, as Margot calls him, wants to know more. He’s not going to find it out from Lucy, who’s gone AWOL, or from her friends, who treat her absence as no big deal—hey, she’s probably just getting it on with somebody or getting wasted somewhere. But Margot can’t help taking Levi’s death more personally, since she knows that he was once Eliza’s boyfriend and is convinced that somebody’s covering something up. In fact, pretty much everybody is covering up pretty much everything, and readers waiting for the big reveal will have to get by on a diet of gossip, gap-filled memories, and college angst in the meantime.

The payoff is handsome, but the road there is too much of too little.