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From Booklist, Copyright © American Library Association. Used with permission.

Miranda, best-selling author of a string of thrillers including All the Missing Girls (2016) and The Only Survivors (2023), delivers another supercharged atmospheric novel here, set on a college campus clinging to a Virginia mountainside. Beckett Bowery, who attended Wyatt College 20 years before, is getting her daughter, Delilah, settled on campus. Beckett didn’t want her daughter to attend Wyatt—she is haunted by what happened decades before, when two young men died in a steam tunnel below campus after a fire was set, supposedly by Beckett’s roommate and best friend, who disappeared that night. A pall of suspicion that Beckett helped her roommate has hung over her ever since. This thriller’s harrowing events center on an unscheduled campus event called “The Howling,” where students play a dangerous game of tag through campus and forest. The Howling claimed two lives when Beckett was a student—and now her daughter goes missing. Has she become the target of the town’s hatred for her mother? The action shuttles between two decades ago and right now, with Beckett narrating. The question of whether Beckett is an unreliable narrator ratchets up the tension considerably. A terrific read, except for anxious parents of college-bound students.