Book Review: The Suicide House

Chicago forensic reconstructionist Rory Moore and her criminal profiler partner Lane Phillips investigate a string of bizarre suicides at a prestigious prep school in Indiana, leading them down on a trail of secrets and deception to get to the bottom of it all. Stories set in elite schools and colleges are a ripe recipe for whodunnits (The Secret History? The Secret Place?), and Charlie Donlea's latest outing is no different. The Suicide House, the second book to feature Moore after Some Choose Darkness, is as much an exciting character study of the idiosyncratic protagonist as it's a suspense-soaked tale of thrills and chills that jumps back and forth in time between when two students are murdered in an abandoned boarding house located near the school during an initiation ceremony and the successive brutal deaths of three of their friends, even as it manages to juggle an overwhelmingly crowded plot crammed with multiple intertwining storylines and too many characters to count.