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Jessica Miller is everything she aspired to be when she arrived was a freshman at the prestigious Duquette University; beautiful, successful, confident, enviable. It is the latter characteristic that is driving Jessica’s excitement in attending her university’s ten year anniversary weekend. Not even the unsolved murder of her friend and fellow East House Seven member Heather, committed ten years ago when Heather was stabbed seventeen times with a pair of scissors, can damper Jessica’s enthusiasm. This is going to be her time, her opportunity to show everyone at school who they were missing.

But other people have different ideas.

As Jessica is reunited with her former East House Seven friends, dark secrets and untold truths bubble to the surface and within twenty-four hours the murderer will be revealed along with a damning truth that none of them could have seen coming.

I have become fascinated with dark academia books and this one certainly fits the bill; a gothic university, a group of friends hiding who they truly are from each other, a murder, and tons of atmospheric tension. As a result, I scored this book very highly and found the greatest strength of the book to be its characters.

Before I begin to discuss the various personalities that make up the East House Seven I will state that these characters are not for everyone. With the exception of maybe two or three characters, the people inhabiting this story are not exactly ones I would personally keep, including Jessica herself. Jessica is a very complicated character, set on reinventing herself into the person she so desperately wants to be. She’ll push, scheme, and take out anyone who gets in the way, even if she knows it’s wrong (and that’s an important thing to remember throughout the book). At the same time, I also found myself sympathizing with Jessica. Her home life is a disaster and she, above all else, wants to belong. This is something I feel a lot of people can relate to, the desire to be seen and listened to. That being said, not all of us do what Jessica does to make sure she is seen.

And the “gems” she chooses to be friends with aren’t much better. Without revealing anything, I will say that the East House Seven are the type of students that you see across the hallway in the school, desperately wish to be friends with them, and then when the dirt comes out, you have a breath of sigh and think “Thank God I’m not friends with those people!” At times, it was really hard to find anything likeable about them.

All of this further complicates the main question at hand. Who killed Heather? Everyone will be blamed at least once, but when the true culprit (or culprits maybe?) are revealed, the reader will be left wondering how had this missed it?

5 out of 5 stars