Let me start off by saying I love my college friends. Many of us are still close after more than twenty years—we WhatsApp together, vacation together, travel to celebrate milestones and birthdays, and we’ve never, ever covered up a murder. I can’t say as much for the groups of college friends who populate some of my favorite mysteries and thrillers—but in a way, I can relate. College campuses are a hotbed for intense friendships—those forever on the brink of burning up or spiraling out of control.
I think that’s why I find this sub-genre of suspense so relatable and entirely compelling. These authors have tapped into something very real, then taken only one or two steps further into the darkness to craft delightfully insidious, obsessive, and toxic friendships among their characters.
I had these charged dynamics in mind as I began to draft Friends and Liars, in which an estranged group of college friends reunite five years after the mysterious death of their classmate and one-time close friend, heiress Clare Annabell Monroe. The book’s mystery centers around how Clare wound up floating face down in Lake Como, Italy, outside her family’s lavish palazzo five years ago—and who was responsible.
It’s the sudden loss of their friend that has torn apart this once tight-knit group, but many of the secrets they’ve been keeping—some of which may be tied up in the truth about her death—predate that terrible night. This is a group who was already on the brink, already careening toward tragedy.
Here are six thrillers set on college campuses, or reuniting a group of college friends. The relationships are pernicious and murders abound. Buckle up.
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Donna Tartt, The Secret History
The ur-collegiate thriller, it would be impossible to begin such a reading list with any other novel. Dear Edmund “Bunny” Corcoran—unlikable, yes, but deserving of a deadly tumble into a ravine? Set on the campus of Vermont’s fictional Hampden College in the 1980s, Tartt reveals the killers to be Bunny’s insular and erudite group of college friends right from the outset.
As narrator Richard Papen claims in the novel’s opening, “I do not now nor did I ever have anything in common with any of them, nothing except a knowledge of Greek and the year of my life I spent in their company.” Well, that and a murder plot.
As the year progresses, Richard becomes enmeshed with the group, with whom he is undeniably fascinated, and pulled into their morally dubious behavior. Under the tutelage of their eccentric and intellectually seductive Classics professor, and spurred on by one another, the group seeks transcendence, yet makes a fatally debaucherous choice that leads to blackmail and revenge. A chilling modern classic.
Ruth Ware, The It Girl
Ruth Ware’s collegiate thriller is both a page-turner and a searing examination of a group of college friends with years of lies between them. The story unfolds in dual timelines. “Before” takes place during Hannah’s first year at Oxford University, leading up the murder of her suitemate April, the quintessential “It Girl.” We then catch up with Hannah “After,” ten years later, as she’s expecting her first child, working at a bookstore in Edinburgh—and is inevitably drawn back into the past.
The Oxford porter who was convicted of the murder has died suddenly in prison, and soon new information comes to light suggesting he may, in fact, have been innocent. So who killed April?
The jarring news leads Hannah back to her old college friends with whom she’s fallen out of touch, and she soon begins to suspect that she may not have as solid a grasp on the web of relationships as she once thought she did. One of them has been keeping secrets from her. One of them may have been responsible for April’s murder.
Kimberly McCreight, Friends Like These
During a weekend trip to a luxe vacation spot in New York’s Catskills, a group of six college friends, now in their early thirties, gather to save one of their own from the clutches of addiction—and run up against the past. It’s been ten years since the shocking suicide of their Vassar College classmate, Alice, but her death still haunts them—and binds them together.
Flash forward to the end of the weekend, and Detective Julia Scutt has been called to investigate a car crash in the woods. One of the friends is dead, another missing, and no one is telling the truth. “Best friends are supposed to stand by you, no matter what,” asserts the unidentified narrator of the novel’s prologue. “But close friends can also let you get away with too much. And what feels like total acceptance, what masquerades as unconditional love, can turn toxic.”
This is one of my favorites of Kimberly McCreight’s, and I’m looking forward to the TV adaptation.
Vera Kurian, Never Saw Me Coming
In a chilling twist on the toxic collegiate friend group novel, Vera Kurian’s debut follows John Adams University freshman Chloe Sevre—a diagnosed psychopath who has enrolled in a special campus study for students with psychopathy. Lack of empathy. Emotional detachment. Narcissism.
All psychopaths aren’t dangerous, of course, or violent. But Chloe isn’t all psychopaths. She enrolls at her DC-based college in part because of the city’s high murder rate. Perfect for her plans of offing her childhood friend Will, also a John Adams University student.
But roles reverse when one of the seven students in the psychopath study is murdered, and Chloe must race to identify the killer—and decide who she can trust among a very untrustworthy group of friends. Smartly and propulsively written, this is a true page-turner.
Ashley Winstead, In My Dreams I Hold a Knife
Ten years ago, Heather Shelby was murdered on the campus of fictional North Carolina college, Duquette University. Her death shattered Jessica Miller’s group of friends, “The East House Seven,” now minus Heather, who have since gone their separate ways. But a decade has passed, and insecure, perfection-seeking Jessica is determined to make the most out of her college reunion. Everyone is going to see how much she’s gown, how much she’s achieved, how exceptional she’s become.
Unfortunately, not everyone is ready to leave the past in the past. Ten years ago, Heather’s boyfriend Jack was accused of her murder, but never convicted. Now, as Jessica returns for the much-anticipated Duquette Homecoming Weekend, she’s reunited with her once-close friends, and the group is confronted with the reality that someone is unwilling to let Heather’s murder go unsolved—or to let their secrets remain hidden.
In chapters that toggle between college and the present, the truth about what happened to Heather is tantalizingly dredged to the surface.
Cambria Brockman, Tell Me Everything
In January 2011, Malin is a senior at Maine-set Hawthorne College, participating in the Senior Day tradition of jumping into a frozen lake with her group of six friends, who have been close since freshman year. They live in a house together, they’ve shared everything over the past three years. But cracks are developing within the group, much to Malin’s dismay, and by the end of the night, one of them will be dead.
“If someone had looked at us through the frosty second-story window this morning…they’d be jealous of us, of our youth and closeness, all of it. Jealous of our happiness. Jealous of a lie.” Malin has been keeping a dark secret, and she’s not the only one. In chapters that mine the past, and as Senior Day unfolds, secrets are revealed and the bonds of friendship are tested in this unnerving, suspenseful campus thriller.
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