by Vi Keeland
First published 2025
Elizabeth teaches creative writing at a college and genuinely loves the first day of a new semester. Then a student submits chapter one of a novel called The Reckoning. The story follows a high school senior who sleeps with her teacher. Elizabeth stops cold. She knows this plot. She lived it. The girl in the manuscript is her best friend Jocelyn, and Elizabeth already knows the ending because she wrote it herself twenty years ago, with her own hands. The professor in the story dies. Elizabeth killed him. Now someone is feeding the chapters back to her one by one, and she has no idea who is sitting in her classroom with that knowledge. To find the answer, she travels back to her Louisiana hometown. The town holds what she buried, and the people there have long memories. The book builds toward one question Elizabeth cannot stop asking: who knows, and what do they want from her?
Genres: drama, mystery, contemporary, adult-fiction, thriller, psychological-thriller
Vibes: atmospheric, dark, introspective, suspenseful, tension-filled, thought-provoking
Tropes: mystery-unraveling, past-catching-up, secrets-revealed, unreliable-narrator
Setting: Louisiana, college
Period: 20 years ago, present day
277 pages · Paperback · Atria/Emily Bestler Books
Content warnings: abuse, murder, sexual-assault