The It Girl by Ruth Ware
First line: Afterwards, it was the door she would remember.
Summary: Hannah Jones arrives at Oxford for her first term to find her life changed forever. It has been her dream to attend university and when she meets her roommate April, she feels as if she has won the jackpot. April is smart, beautiful and thrilling. However, by the end of the year April will be dead.
Ten years later, Hannah is married to Will and is expecting their first child. She has spent the last decade trying to forget that terrible night when she came home to find her best friend murdered in their dorm room. But when the news of April’s killer dying in prison it starts to bring everything back. Then a reporter contacts her hoping to get more insight into that night because he believes that the wrong person was convicted of April’s death. If Hannah was wrong, then who killed April?
My Thoughts: I go back and forth on Ruth Ware. Some books have been good and others have been very predictable. I think this one is probably close to being her best. It had a twisting plot filled with flashbacks which I love. And parts of it were set in Edinburgh which I also love!
The beginning moved fairly slowly as we are introduced to the characters and the layout of the story plus all of the introspection on Hannah’s part but at the end the pace picked up. I could easily imagine a girl like April. I feel we have all known someone similar to her making it easy to sympathize with Hannah. Throughout I kept changing my mind on who I suspected as Hannah kept looking into the past. And until just before the big reveal did I finally get it. Even though the book is rather large it seemed to quickly once I was invested in Hannah’s search for answers.