In With Friends Like These, Alissa Lee's inventively plotted debut thriller, some Harvard roommates turn a secret college game into a tradition extending well (and worrisomely) beyond graduation.
Sara, a fledgling Manhattan photographer who works part-time as an assistant to an established artist, has been living with guilt ever since Claudine, one of her five Harvard roommates, died during their senior year. Twenty-three years later, Sara is sure she sees Claudine on the street in New York--the city Sara and her friends are about to stealthily traverse as they play the Circus, which is basically the game Assassin with water guns, and which they enjoyed playing with Claudine before she died. This time the stakes are high: the winner will pocket nearly a million bucks. (One of the friends invested the game's pot wisely.) Offsetting Sara's ebullience--she, like the other players, could really use the money--is another friend's warning that a county DA in Massachusetts wants to reopen the case surrounding Claudine's death.
As the players plunge ahead with the Circus, Lee teases the novel's plot concerns--what happened to Claudine, what's up with her doppelgänger, and who's going to win the game?--while Sara puzzles over her college friendships and her high-stress marriage. With Friends Like These can sometimes lean too hard into Sara's psychologizing; the keenest insight comes not from her but from one of her old Harvard roommates' kids, who observes that the Circus "makes you all crazy." It also stands to make one of them flush with cash. --Nell Beram, author and freelance writer