The Things We Do to Our Friends

A student seeking to reinvent herself at university discovers that the clique she thinks is her chance might be even more dangerous than the secret she is trying to outrun in The Things We Do to Our Friends, Heather Darwent's tantalizingly sinister debut thriller. Clare arrives alone in Edinburgh with a focus as much on escaping an incident in her past (not disclosed until late in the novel) as on her studies. She knows she'll need to make connections with the sort of people who represent what she would like to be, and an encounter at the bar where she works with an unusually friendly group of privileged students, led by beautiful queen bee Tabitha, changes everything. It is not long until she even finds herself with an invitation to join them on a holiday to Tabitha's mother's house in France. Once there, Tabitha presents Clare with a business proposition, and when Clare hesitates to agree, she discovers that the others know about her past.

Darwent slowly metes out details of Clare's past as well as hints about her future--Clare retrospectively narrates, chapter one opening with "I've decided to look back and make some kind of sense of it all"--as Tabitha takes her project in increasingly darker directions. Readers will be on the edge of their seats with this gripping story of codependency and obsession, and fans of Kate Lowe's The Furies and J.T. Ellison's Good Girls Lie will devour this--and eagerly await more from Darwent. --Kristen Allen-Vogel, information services librarian at Dayton Metro Library

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