Bad Like Us

High school senior Eva Porta is looking forward to a relaxing spring break getaway at a classmate’s private seaside cabin in woodsy Tillamook County with eight friends. Despite Eva’s best attempts to let loose, have fun, and get closer to her crush Colton Demarco, the trip is immediately plagued by romantic drama and tensions from a recent academic cheating scandal. Incessant and intrusive Instagramming from Piper Meyers, the most glamorous and connected of the group, intensifies the existing conflicts. When one of the friends turns up dead under suspicious circumstances, Eva finds herself desperately untangling a sordid web of secrets to uncover the killer hiding in their midst. Though the overarching narrative is sometimes bogged down by a too large cast and inconsistently developed motivations, Lepore (The Last One to Fall) keeps the reader guessing by juggling multiple perspectives, flashbacks, and fictional interstitial audio transcripts and news articles, and lightly touches on issues of economic privilege, jealousy, and social media overconsumption in this fast-paced, dramatically executed locked-room murder mystery. Most of the protagonists read as white except for classmate Alice, who is Black. Ages 13–up. [em]Agent: Whitney Ross, High Line Literary. (Mar.) [/em]