Stephanie Barron is a graduate of Princeton and Stanford Universities, where she studied history. A former intelligence analyst at the CIA, she is the author of thirty novels, including the critically acclaimed Merry Folger series, which she writes under the name Francine Mathews.
Barron's latest novel is Jane and the Final Mystery.
At CrimeReads she tagged seven favorite mystery novels set in academe, including:
The Lying Game, by Ruth WareRead about the other entries on the list.
Four girls tied by schoolgirl murder are also the center of this beautifully-written book, but with an important difference from French’s novel: these girls have grown up, and the violence in theirpasts threatens the lives each of them has managed to live in its shadow. The discovery of human remains in the liminal ground between fields and marsh surrounding their old boarding school—a nostalgic place Ware allows us to experience through the girls’ eyes in this dual-timeline novel–causes one of them to summon the others to her home, a deteriorating mill formerly owned by her artist father/school instructor. Her friends rush to support her, ostensibly to attend their school reunion, but in truth to lay the unquiet ghosts of their conflicted pasts. Memory, with its mutable face, is perhaps the strongest character in this world half-sinking into water; it flickers and distorts, betrays and unites, and stridently demands the truth.
The Lying Game is among Kathleen Barber's ten unputdownable suspense novels, thrillers, & other creepy books.
--Marshal Zeringue
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