Publisher: Mira
Publication Date: December 2019
Perched atop a hill in the tiny town of Marchburg, Virginia, The Goode School is a prestigious prep school known as a Silent Ivy. The boarding school of choice for daughters of the rich and influential, it accepts only the best and the brightest. Its elite status, long-held traditions and honor code are ideal for preparing exceptional young women for brilliant futures at Ivy League universities and beyond. But a stranger has come to Goode, and this ivy has turned poisonous.
In a world where appearances are everything, as long as students pretend to follow the rules, no one questions the cruelties of the secret societies or the dubious behavior of the privileged young women who expect to get away with murder. But when a popular student is found dead, the truth cannot be ignored. Rumors suggest she was struggling with a secret that drove her to suicide.
But look closely…because there are truths and there are lies, and then there is everything that really happened.
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My thoughts:
The story, Good Girls Lie, opens with a lie and a truth. It's your job to figure out which is which. I'll admit that this book was slow to start for me. I wasn't into the perspective switches and was kind of confused as to where the story was going. However, I did end up ultimately liking the end result. The characters were interesting and trying to figure out who had secrets kept me on my toes. At about halfway, the pieces started to fall into place and I found myself sucked in and wanting to see the solution. I did think I had guessed the big twist, but I was only partial correct. There are a lot of surprises along the away as well. I also loved the ending. It is almost best to go into this book not knowing much more than the synopsis. Even though it is slow to start, it's worth sticking to the end. I definitely recommend this one. What a great way to start off the new year!
THE HANGING
The girl’s body dangles from the
tall iron gates guarding the school’s entrance. A closer examination shows the
ends of a red silk tie peeking out like a cardinal on a winter branch, forcing
her neck into a brutal angle. She wears her graduation robe and multicolored
stole as if knowing she’ll never see the achievement. It rained overnight and
the thin robe clings to her body, dew sparkling on the edges. The last tendrils
of dawn’s fog laze about her legs, which are five feet from the ground.
There is no breeze, no birds
singing or squirrels industriously gathering for the long winter ahead, no cars
passing along the street, only the cool, misty morning air and the gentle
metallic creaking of the gates under the weight of the dead girl. She is
suspended in midair, her back to the street, her face hidden behind a curtain
of dirty, wet hair, dark from the rains.
Because of the damage to her face,
it will take them some time to officially identify her. In the beginning, it
isn’t even clear she attends the school, despite wearing The Goode School
robes.
But she does.
The fingerprints will prove it. Of
course, there are a few people who know exactly who is hanging from the
school’s gates. Know who, and know why. But they will never tell. As word
spreads of the apparent suicide, The Goode School’s all-female student body
begin to gather, paying silent, terrified homage to their fallen compatriot.
The gates are closed and locked—as they always are overnight—buttressed on
either side by an ivy-covered, ten-foot-high, redbrick wall, but it tapers off
into a knee-wall near the back entrance to the school parking lot, and so is
escapable by foot. The girls of Goode silently filter out from the dorms,
around the end of Old West Hall and Old East Hall to Front Street—the main
street of Marchburg, the small Virginia town housing the elite prep school—and
take up their positions in front of the gate in a wedge of crying, scared,
worried young women who glance over shoulders looking for the one who is
missing from their ranks. To reassure themselves this isn’t their friend, their
sister, their roommate.
Another girl joins them, but no one
notices she comes from the opposite direction, from town. She was not behind
the redbrick wall.
Whispers rise from the small crowd,
nothing loud enough to be overheard but forming a single question.
Who
is it? Who?
A solitary siren pierces the
morning air, the sound bleeding upward from the bottom of the hill, a rising
crescendo. Someone has called the sheriff.
Goode perches like a gargoyle above
the city’s small downtown, huddles behind its ivy-covered brick wall. The
campus is flanked by two blocks of restaurants, bars, and necessary shops. The
school’s buildings are tied together with trolleys—enclosed glass-and-wood
bridges that make it easy for the girls to move from building to building in
climate-controlled comfort. It is quiet, dignified, isolated. As are the girls
who attend the school; serious, studious. Good. Goode girls are always good.
They go on to great things.
The headmistress, or dean, as she
prefers to call herself, Ford Julianne Westhaven, great-granddaughter several
times removed from the founder of The Goode School, arrives in a flurry, her
driver, Rumi, braking the family Bentley with a screech one hundred feet away from
the gates. The crowd in the street blocks the car and, for a moment, the sight
of the dangling girl. No one stops to think about why the dean might be off
campus this early in the morning. Not yet, anyway.
Dean Westhaven rushes out of the
back of the dove-gray car and runs to the crowd, her face white, lips pressed
firmly together, eyes roving. It is a look all the girls at Goode recognize and
shrink from.
The dean’s irritability is
legendary, outweighed only by her kindness. It is said she alone approves every
application to the school, that she chooses the Goode girls by hand for their
intelligence, their character. Her say is final. Absolute. But for all her
goodness, her compassion, her kindness, Dean Westhaven has a temper.
She begins to gather the girls into
groups, small knots of natural blondes and brunettes and redheads, no
fantastical dye allowed. Some shiver in oversize school sweatshirts and running
shorts, some are still in their pajamas. The dean is looking for the chick
missing from her flock. She casts occasional glances over her shoulder at the
grim scene behind her. She, too, is unsure of the identity of the body, or so
it seems. Perhaps she simply doesn’t want to acknowledge the truth.
The siren grows to an earsplitting
shriek and dies midrange, a soprano newly castrated. The deputies from the
sheriff’s office have arrived, the sheriff hot on their heels. Within moments,
they cordon off the gates, move the students back, away, away. One approaches
the body, cataloging; another begins taking discreet photographs, a macabre
paparazzi.
They speak to Dean Westhaven, who
quietly, breathlessly, admits she hasn’t approached the body and has no idea
who it might be.
She is lying, though. She knows. Of
course, she knows. It was inevitable.
The sheriff, six sturdy feet of
muscle and sinew, approaches the gate and takes a few shots with his iPhone. He
reaches for the foot of the dead girl and slowly, slowly turns her around.
The eerie morning silence is broken
by the words, soft and gasping, murmurs moving sinuously through the crowd of
girls, their feet shuffling in the morning chill, the fog’s tendrils
disappearing from around the posts.
They say her name, an unbroken
chain of accusation and misery.
Ash.
Ash.
Ash.
Author Bio:
J.T. Ellison is the New York Times and USA Today bestselling author of more
than 20 novels, and the EMMY-award winning co-host of A WORD ON WORDS, Nashville's
premier literary show. With millions of books in print, her work has won critical acclaim,
prestigious awards, and has been published in 26 countries. Ellison lives in Nashville with her
husband and twin kittens.
Social Links:
Twitter: @thrillerchick
Facebook: @JTEllison14
Instagram: @thrillerchick
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