They Never Learn

Scarlett Clark teaches English at Gorman University and has killed for sixteen years. She picks the worst man on campus, studies him, and arranges his death to look like an accident or a suicide. Nobody has ever looked twice.

Then one of her killings goes wrong. As the bodies add up, the university takes notice, and Dr. Mina Pierce, who teaches in the psychology department, begins following a thread Scarlett cannot let her pull. Scarlett's answer is the one that has always protected her: get close, join the investigation, and charm the woman leading it.

Elsewhere on campus, freshman Carly Schiller wants only to keep her head down and work. She has just escaped an emotionally abusive father. Then her roommate and only friend, Allison Hadley, is assaulted at a party by an upperclassman, Sebastian Waller, and the university responds with the indifference such institutions tend to show. Carly's fantasies about what should happen to him begin to feel less like fantasies.

The novel alternates between Scarlett and Carly, each narrating in the first person. It is the author's second book, written in the shadow of the Kavanaugh confirmation hearings. It reads as a dark campus thriller with an angry edge, and it sets revenge against justice and asks whom a university protects when it has to choose. Some of it is uncomfortable reading, and it means to be.