BAD HABITS

Grad students are tasty snacks in the shark tank of faculty ambition.

Gentry sets her third thriller in the world of academe, where we find a slew of powerful female characters and some male eye candy. Mackenzie Claire Woods has just finished her keynote at an academic conference in LA and is about to take a young fellow she knows only as "Harvard" up to her room in the SkyLoft Hotel when she spots her long-estranged childhood best friend. Gwen Whitney was the princess to Mac's pauper, her escape route from a hardscrabble childhood that included junior beauty pageants, her father's abandonment, her mother's drug addiction, and a disabled sister. Both Mac and Gwen went on to graduate school at The Program, a taxing course of study in rarefied disciplines, painted with a welcome touch of satire. Coming from her family, is it any wonder grad student Mac can't make heads or tails of topics like Diasporic Feminisms, Dualities of Motion and Emotion, and Introduction to Economimesis? Most problematically, she can't get through a tome titled "Ethical Negation," written by the faculty star, Bethany Ladd, a sexy genius everyone is competing to impress and whose seminar is offered at the same time as Mac's restaurant shift. Since the poor girl is not only putting herself through school, but supporting her mother and sister, she desperately needs a fellowship Bethany seems to control. The narrative hopscotches between the challenges of grad school and the unfolding drama, 10 years later, in the SkyLoft Hotel. Mac sends Harvard up to her room by himself and steps out of the elevator to waylay Gwen. They have a heart-to-heart during which Mac gets blackout drunk and wakes up unable to remember just how much she confessed about some terrible incident in the past: suspense by alcohol. As the story races to its conclusion, a racism issue with another student is needlessly tacked on and believability is tossed to the winds.

A tense psychological thriller with an intriguing setup but too many far-fetched twists at the end.