I really enjoyed this one! A depraved 'The Good Place' in the best way possible. *Thank you to Knopf, Pantheon, Vintage, and Anchor and NetGalley for the e-ARC of this title.*

I really wanted to like this one but I struggled to get through it and eventually had to DNF @ 30%. I believe this story is for someone else but not me and that’s okay!

Christine Murphy, debut novelist, has given us a chillingly dystopian tale. Set in coastal California during a month of lingering wildfires that fill the air with breath-stifling smoke, the book’s first-person narrator is an eighth-year PhD candidate completing a dissertation on Buddhist religious theory. Though one might expect serene forbearance from Sarah, we find her all but friendless and steeped in bitter alienation. The cause: she’s a rape victim compelled to teach and study alongside her victimizer, who’s emerged unscathed from her accusations. What’s more, she’s concluded that her academic superiors are both exploitative and intellectually dishonest.
She has one friend in the program, a man who’s offered her singular compassion and chaste companionship in her crisis of faith, which has lasted three years, since the rape.
One morning she finds him dead, a hypodermic protruding from his forearm. The police conclude his death was suicide by heroin, despite her protestations that he’d never used that drug in her experience and, more tellingly, that the needle was in his left arm, while he himself was left-handed. Her suspicion that he’s been murdered sends her into a depression. She is crushed to learn, as she investigates, that her dead friend was himself a teenaged rapist.
She not only hits bottom, but careens into a covert rampage, with criminal overtones, against her university and department. And here the murder mystery underlying the novel’s narrative unfolds.
I should stop here, as I’m about to stray into spoiler land. Just two more plot points need mention: Sarah falls under the influence of two individuals, one a beneficent ally, the other a man with prosecuting a covert rampage of his own.
This is an unconventional thriller, in that the mystery elements are fetchingly submerged behind brilliant character touches. The drift here verges on a ‘downer’ plot arc, but it’s redeemed by the humor struggling through in Sarah’s view of the world.
A winner.

Sarah is a Ph.D student at the end of her program; teaching students, wrestling with her advisor, and spending most of her time with her best friend, Nathan. The two of them enjoy the occasional drug-fueled bender. When Nathan dies of an overdose, Sarah is convinced it was a homocide. The police don't take her seriously - afterall, she herself admits they were regular drug users, just not of the harder variety. Since Nathan was the one person who believed and supported her after her rape, Sarah feels a particular call to fight for him.
Murphy writes with beautiful staccatto sentences that capture the detached emotion of her protagonist. I didn't think I would love the book - I found myself unsympathetic after reading the description. I'm neither a Ph.D student nor a drug user, as I think most of Murphy's potential readers would say. She absolutely captured me, and I found myself staying up late to find out what happened next. Sarah is great at compartmentalizing - she has to be in order to survive what's happened to her. That has to be a difficult perspective to write from, but Murphy handles it masterfully.
Sarah's focus in her work is on the buddhism and violence, and the idea that while one of the core doctrines is nonviolence, violence itself can be justified if it prevents future harm. Absolutely fascinating when you pair it with the rapists found on every college campus, and how little is done to quash their future prospects as punishment for their actions. The book is an exploration of those ideas - violence and our response to violence. Highly recommend.