The Truants
Jess is looking forward to only one thing in her first year at a British university: being taught by Lorna Clay. The charismatic professor teaches a course on Agatha Christie, and Jess is in her thrall. Outside the classroom, she falls in with impulsive Georgie, Georgie’s worldly boyfriend Alec, and Jess’s devoted new boyfriend Nick.
When a betrayal breaks up the group of friends, Jess turns to Lorna. I haven’t read a lot of Agatha Christie, but even I appreciated the references and ways that Weinberg paralleled the mystery of these characters with Christie’s stories and biography. A little less highbrow than Donna Tartt’s The Secret History, but fans of that book will like this one.
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Publisher’s Description
People disappear when they most want to be seen.
Jess Walker has come to a concrete campus under the flat gray skies of East Anglia for one reason: to be taught by the mesmerizing and rebellious Dr. Lorna Clay, whose seminars soon transform Jess’s thinking on life, love, and Agatha Christie. Swept up in Lorna’s thrall, Jess falls in with a tightly knit group of rule-breakers–Alec, a courageous South African journalist with a nihilistic streak; Georgie, a seductive, pill-popping aristocrat; and Nick, a handsome geologist with layers of his own.
But the dynamic between the friends begins to darken, until a tragedy shatters their friendships and love affairs, and reveals a terrible secret. Soon Jess must face the question she fears most: what is the true cost of an extraordinary life?
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