Nine of the best campus thrillers

Heather Darwent was raised in Yorkshire and moved to Scotland to study at the University of Edinburgh.

The Things We Do to Our Friends is her debut novel.

At CrimeReads Darwent tagged nine shining campus thrillers, including two titles under the theme "The changing genre":

I love to discover a book that has a fresh twist, like Never Saw Me Coming by Vera Kurian. This book takes an exceptionally pacy form, as a group of psychopaths come together for a clinical study at a college. Quickly, this leads to murder, and I found it to be a brilliant page-turner with plenty of twists.

Next year sees the publication of Rebecca Makkai’s gripping literary thriller, I Have Some Questions for You. The narrator, Bodie, looks back at a crime where the perpetrator may be wrongly imprisoned. This book has a campus setting paired with the addition of a true crime podcast, which gives the book a really modern feel. It intrigued me to learn that Makkai still lives in the same school grounds she went to as a child, and perhaps this is why she’s so able to create an environment that’s completely immersive.

Read about two more entries on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue