Write what you know—it’s a piece of advice you hear a lot. I’m not sure how useful it is. My first novel opened with a mysterious man buying a shovel so he could help a friend dig a grave in the woods. My latest begins with an eleven-year-old girl sneaking out her bedroom window for a walk under the stars and stumbling across the body of a serial killer’s victim.
I’ve never found myself in either of those situations.
But when it comes to choosing a setting for a story, writing what you know has its benefits. For my new novel Don’t Turn Around, I wanted to use a small college town as the setting—somewhere rural and remote. A place where my serial killer, known as Merkury, could take a college student as his twelfth victim. A place where my protagonist, Kate Summerlin, all grown up now at twenty-nine, could go to track the killer down and come to grips with what happened to her when she was eleven.
I knew the perfect spot, because I grew up in upstate New York and went to college at Colgate University in a small town called Hamilton. I knew the campus on the top of the hill, the academic buildings with their stone facades, the movie theater downtown. I changed a few details and Colgate became Seagate College. Hamilton became Alexander. The back roads and woods on the outskirts of the town became places where a serial killer could operate.
Write what you know.
Like anyone who writes, I owe a lot of what I know to the work of others. So here are five crime novels that have entertained and influenced me—all of them set in college towns.
First Lady by Michael Malone
First Lady is one of Malone’s “Justin and Cuddy” novels, featuring Detective Justin Savile and Police Chief Cuddy Mangum and set in the fictional town of Hillston, North Carolina (think Chapel Hill). Hillston is the home of Haver University, and as the novel opens a prominent Haver professor is on trial, accused of murdering his wife. At the same time, Justin and Cuddy are working to track down a serial killer who’s targeting young women and leaving behind taunting messages with each new kill. Fast-paced and beautifully written, the novel weaves together these two plotlines while bringing back characters from earlier books in the series, including an old flame of Cuddy’s, Lee Haver Brookside, now married to North Carolina’s governor. And when the governor is linked to one of the serial killer’s victims, the stakes of the case become even higher and more personal.
Where They Found Her by Kimberly McCreight
When the body of a newborn girl is found near the campus of Ridgedale University in New Jersey, local reporter Molly Anderson is assigned to the story. Soon Molly’s efforts to understand what happened to the child result in her discovering a series of unsettling crimes that have taken place in the town over a period of two decades. Interwoven with Molly’s investigation are chapters from the perspective of three other women: Barbara, the wife of Ridgedale’s chief of police; Sandy, a teenage girl from the wrong side of the tracks; and Jenna, Sandy’s troubled mother. In the course of the narrative, we learn how these characters’ lives are interconnected, as Molly’s search for answers leads her down a tangled path through Ridgedale’s history—and ultimately to darker truths than she could have imagined.
Crying Wolf by Peter Abrahams
In Crying Wolf, Nat, a working-class kid from Colorado, enrolls at a prestigious New England College called Inverness and develops a friendship with Grace and Izzie Zorn, twins from a wealthy family. Exploring the tunnels that run beneath the campus, they discover a hidden room stocked with wine and old books—a place that becomes their secret retreat. But when Nat’s mother loses her job, his future at Inverness is thrown into doubt. He needs money to cover his tuition, and Grace and Izzie come up with a plan to get it—a plan that involves faking a kidnapping and collecting ransom money from the twin’s father. What they don’t realize is that their secret retreat isn’t so secret. Someone has been watching them and overhearing their conversations—a thief who’s been stealing from dorm rooms and using the tunnels to slip away unseen. And now the fake kidnapping they’ve been planning is about to become very real.
They Never Learn by Layne Fargo
Scarlett Clark is a professor of English literature at Pennsylvania’s Gorman University—and a killer who targets men who abuse Gorman’s female students. She’s been getting away with it for sixteen years, but her most recent kill prompts the university to set up a task force to look into the suspicious deaths that keep happening on campus. Now she’ll need to take special care as she plans her next murder and strikes up a relationship with the head of the task force, Mina Pierce. In a parallel storyline, Gorman student Carly Schiller witnesses an assault on her roommate Allison at a party and begins to think about taking revenge on the fellow student who’s responsible. Fargo writes in short, propulsive chapters that ratchet up the tension on the way to a conclusion that’s both disturbing and satisfying.
Girls by Frederick Busch
The protagonist of this literary thriller is Jack, a campus security officer at an unnamed liberal arts college in central New York. The girls of the title are the ones whose faces he sees all too frequently on missing-person posters on campus and in the surrounding towns. One of them is Janice Tanner, the fourteen-year-old daughter of a local minister. When a friend of the Tanner family asks Jack to look into the girl’s disappearance, Jack wants nothing to do with it: he and his wife are dealing with a heartbreak of their own, the recent death of their infant daughter. But with his marriage disintegrating and the New York winter seeming to drag on forever, Jack takes on the case. Busch’s skillful prose, intricate plot, and rich cast of characters add up to a devastating story of grief and loss.
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