DON'T BREATHE A WORD

A decades-old secret comes to light at an elite boarding school.

In 1962, Hardwick Preparatory Academy “lifer” Connie Abbott is, like many Americans, worried about the bomb. The last thing she wants to do is pretend there has been a nuclear attack, but when her crush suggests she join five other students in an experiment to test the school’s fallout shelter, she can’t say no. Things go sideways when the participants discover the experiment has a hidden, sinister purpose (think McCarthyism meets Stanley Milgram’s famous psychological experiment). In the present, high school junior Eva Storm has been at Hardwick for a week and is eager to make friends. Her chance to fit in comes when she’s recruited to join the Fives, Hardwick’s secret society. As she goes through the trials (i.e., hazing), she finds out that only five of the six students who went into the shelter in 1962 came out alive and that students are still forbidden from talking about it. The story grows in intensity from there, as Eva’s and Connie’s first-person narratives collide, the events of 1962 come to a boil, and Eva makes an unsettling discovery about what transpired all those years ago. Personalitywise, the girls are opposites: Eva is an upbeat extrovert while Connie is an anxious introvert. Both are likable, though a bit misguided at times, but they each possess a strong sense of right and wrong. Eva and Connie are assumed White.

An expertly plotted boarding school mystery.