Win Lose Kill Die

Morton Academy accepts only its highest achievers, chosen on grades and ambition alone. Every student there is competing for the same title: Head Girl, and the standing that comes with it. Liz, Taylor, Kat, Marcus and Cole are all contenders, until their classmates start dying.

As the body count rises, the five try to work out who wants the crown badly enough to kill for it. A secret society already holds their loyalty, an old cult is tied to the school's history, and a teacher has plenty to gain from a thinner field of candidates. Any one of them could be responsible.

This is a YA thriller built from dark-academia parts: an elite school, driven students, a name with a history it would rather not explain. The story is narrated by someone whose account cannot be fully trusted, and that unreliability sharpens as the suspects run out. It moves quickly, closer to a slasher film than a whodunit.

Cynthia Murphy sets the killings inside a contest the students have already been trained to win at any cost. The truth only surfaces once nearly everyone in the group has a reason to want it kept buried.