The Book:
The Sorority Murder by Allison Brennan
Published December 28, 2021 by MIRA
Date read: December 31, 2022
The Characters:
Regan
Lucas
Buy it on Bookshop.org | Amazon
The Plot (from Goodreads):
Lucas Vega is obsessed with the death of Candace Swain, who left a sorority party one night and never came back. Her body was found after two weeks, but the case has grown cold. Three years later while interning at the medical examiner’s, Lucas discovers new information, but the police are not interested.
Lucas knows he has several credible pieces of the puzzle. He just isn’t sure how they fit together. So he creates a podcast to revisit Candace’s last hours. Then he encourages listeners to crowdsource what they remember and invites guest lecturer Regan Merritt, a former US marshal, to come on and share her expertise.
New tips come in that convince Lucas and Regan they are onto something. Then shockingly one of the podcast callers turns up dead. Another hints at Candace’s secret life, a much darker picture than Lucas imagined—and one that implicates other sorority sisters. Regan uses her own resources to bolster their theory and learns that Lucas is hiding his own secret. The pressure is on to solve the murder, but first Lucas must come clean about his real motives in pursuing this podcast—before the killer silences him forever.
The Twist:
Lucas was obsessed with Candace because he thought she might be able to tell him something about the disappearance of her friend Adele, who was the older sister of Lucas’s former girlfriend.
Candace had known Adele. They were friends from a class that Rachel taught. Rachel was also the sorority adviser, and the kind of adult that only wanted to relive her youth. She would let the girls party with her to seem cool. One night, the weed they smoked was laced with something else, and Adele had a bad reaction. She freaked out and ended up running off a cliff, hitting her head, and dying. Rachel convinced the students that they should cover it up, dump Adele’s body, and make it look like her car had been in an accident. She was allegedly worried about losing her job for letting underage girls party with her.
The guilt was eating Candace up, and she had decided to come clean about what really happened to Adele. In the week she had disappeared, she was trying to find Adele’s body in the coal mines.
Rachel killed Candace to shut her up. She was dating the detective in charge of the case, and she was able to convince some of the sorority sisters to say things to mislead him further. Rachel had also killed Abernathy and left his body with Adele’s, to make it seem like Abernathy disappeared out of guilt after killing Candace.
The Ending:
Rachel kidnapped Lucas when he finally got close to the truth. She brought him to the mines to kill him as well, but Regan and Lizzie found him in time. Regan killed Rachel to save Lucas.
The Sorority Murder was mainly about Lucas figuring out the truth, with Regan’s help. We don’t learn much about Regan, other than that her son was killed by someone holding a grudge against Regan. It looks like the second book in the series will be more about Regan and her backstory.
The Review:
Thank you to HarperAudio for this gifted copy.
This was my first Allison Brennan novel, but I’m certainly interested in checking out her backlist after reading it! The Sorority Murder starts out very slow, but it’s worth the wait.
I adore audiobooks that have a podcast element. The case in this book was really good. I couldn’t guess the perp into the end, and I really liked how the reveal panned out. The ending was a little far-fetched, but overall I liked it.
I do wish we had learned more about Regan. I can tell from the summary of Book 2 that we’ll find out more about her then, but it felt like she was just teased in a way that took away from the main plot.
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