Book Review: Good Girls Lie

Synopsis:

Good Girls Lie examines the tenuous bonds of friendship, the power of lies, and the desperate lengths to which people will go in order to protect their secrets.

Goode girls don’t lie . . .

Perched atop a hill in the tiny town of Marchburg, Virginia, The Goode School is a prestigious prep school known as a Silent Ivy. It’s the boarding school of choice for daughters of the rich and influential, accepting only the best and the brightest. Goode’s elite status, long-held traditions, and honor code provide an ideal environment in which to prepare exceptional young women for brilliant futures at Ivy League universities . . . and beyond.

But the arrival of a new student turns the ivy poisonous.

In a world where appearances are everything — so long as students pretend to follow the rules — no one questions the cruelties visited upon students by secret societies or the dubious behavior of the privileged young women who expect to get away with murder. But when a popular student is found dead, the truth can no longer be ignored. Rumors suggest she was struggling with a secret that drove her to suicide, but are those rumors true?

Review:

New York Times bestselling author J. T. Ellison delivers a tense, fast-paced thriller set in an exclusive girls’ boarding school in rural Virginia. Ellison says The Goode School is an amalgamation of several private high school and colleges situated in central Virginia. She has always wanted to write a mystery set in a boarding school — she attended Randoph-Macon Woman’s College in Lynchburg, Virginia. So she relates that she has “woven pieces of the school’s legends and tragedies” into her fictional story, including the secret societies and their traditions, ghost stories, and the pressure to transform all-female campuses into coed institutions.

Like many a good mystery, Good Girls Lie opens with a murder. A girl’s body hangs from the iron gates at the school’s entrance. She’s wearing her graduation gown and her feet are mired in morning fog, enhancing the gruesomeness of the scene. Her face is “hidden behind a curtain of dirty, wet hair, dark from the rains. Even were her face visible, her identity would still be unknown because of the damage it has sustained. Beyond the iron gates, the school perches ominously in a foggy haze, full of legends, lore, deadly secrets, and, perhaps, a murderer.

There are truths, and there are lies, and then there is everything that really happened, . . .

Good Girls Lie is populated with complex, intriguing characters, with Ash Carlisle at the forefront of the story. She has come to Goode for a second chance following traumatic family events. “A new life. A new beginning. A new chapter for Ash. But can you ever escape your past?” She will be known as Ash Carr, sworn to secrecy about her past and assured privacy by the school’s headmistress, Dr. Ford Julianne Westhaven, who has offered Ash the fresh start she desperately needs. Ford wants to be a novelist, but she was pressed into duty after a scandal brought her mother’s tenure as dean to an abrupt end. Her mother insisted that it was her duty to take over and run the school that has been helmed by her family since the early 1800s — resisting pressures to make the school coed. Now Ford feels trapped, despite the fact that the school is thriving under her leadership.

Ellison relates the story through varying vantage points. Ash describes her experiences through a first-person narrative that quickly reveals disturbing details about her family’s past, including the recent deaths of her parents. She wants to fit in with the other girls, desperate to keep her true identity known so that she can be “just another Goode girl, accepted because of privilege, brains, and whatever inestimable quality Ford has seen in the application and interviews.”

But Goode is populated with students who are anything but good. They manipulate, compete for attention and popularity, and pull new students into long-held rituals carried out by secret societies. Faculty members are aware of the traditions, but strive to keep them from becoming deadly. Tales about a haunted arboretum, bell tower, and mysterious staircase leading into the institutions’ murky underbelly contrast starkly with the school’s seemingly peaceful existence in the beautiful Blue Ridge Mountains that surround the campus.

Ellison skillfully reveals the school’s secrets, along with those Ash is harboring, as the story progresses and the tension accelerates. Ash reveals early on that she is a liar — “I’ve never understood my compulsive desire to lie.” But with her mother’s encouragement, she came to Ash determined to change. But Ford becomes increasingly suspicious, even though she interviewed Ash via videoconference before admitting her to the school. Ash is a gifted pianist, but suddenly has no interest in pursuing her piano lessons. She has excelled in her computer course and Ford comes to believe that she is a skilled hacker. But if she truly wants to keep her past a secret, why would Ash draw attention to herself? Ellison keeps readers guessing to what extent Ash is succeeding at turning over a new leaf and, if not, the extent to which she has manufactured her past and, perhaps, very identity. Ash proves to be a deliciously unreliable narrator. And, as calamities befall Goode, the number of characters who are suspects multiplies as quickly as the number of dead students. As the dark, atmospheric mystery races to its shocking conclusion, Ellison injects surprising twists and revelations at deftly-timed intervals, making Good Girls Lie a compelling, absorbing thriller.

Excerpt from Good Girls Lie

THE HANGING

The girl’s body dangles from the tall iron gates guarding the school’s entrance. A closer examination shows the ends of a red silk tie peeking out like a cardinal on a winter branch, forcing her neck into a brutal angle. She wears her graduation robe and multicolored stole as if knowing she’ll never see the achievement. It rained overnight and the thin robe clings to her body, dew sparkling on the edges. The last tendrils of dawn’s fog laze about her legs, which are five feet from the ground.

There is no breeze, no birds singing or squirrels industriously gathering for the long winter ahead, no cars passing along the street, only the cool, misty morning air and the gentle metallic creaking of the gates under the weight of the dead girl. She is suspended in midair, her back to the street, her face hidden behind a curtain of dirty, wet hair, dark from the rains.

Because of the damage to her face, it will take them some time to officially identify her. In the beginning, it isn’t even clear she attends the school, despite wearing The Goode School robes.

But she does.

The fingerprints will prove it. Of course, there are a few people who know exactly who is hanging from the school’s gates. Know who, and know why. But they will never tell. As word spreads of the apparent suicide, The Goode School’s all-female student body begin to gather, paying silent, terrified homage to their fallen compatriot. The gates are closed and locked—as they always are overnight—buttressed on either side by an ivy-covered, ten-foot-high, redbrick wall, but it tapers off into a knee-wall near the back entrance to the school parking lot, and so is escapable by foot. The girls of Goode silently filter out from the dorms, around the end of Old West Hall and Old East Hall to Front Street—the main street of Marchburg, the small Virginia town housing the elite prep school—and take up their positions in front of the gate in a wedge of crying, scared, worried young women who glance over shoulders looking for the one who is missing from their ranks. To reassure themselves this isn’t their friend, their sister, their roommate.

Another girl joins them, but no one notices she comes from the opposite direction, from town. She was not behind the redbrick wall.
Whispers rise from the small crowd, nothing loud enough to be overheard but forming a single question.

Who is it? Who?

A solitary siren pierces the morning air, the sound bleeding upward from the bottom of the hill, a rising crescendo. Someone has called the sheriff.

Goode perches like a gargoyle above the city’s small downtown, huddles behind its ivy-covered brick wall. The campus is flanked by two blocks of restaurants, bars, and necessary shops. The school’s buildings are tied together with trolleys—enclosed glass-and-wood bridges that make it easy for the girls to move from building to building in climate-controlled comfort. It is quiet, dignified, isolated. As are the girls who attend the school; serious, studious. Good. Goode girls are always good. They go on to great things.

The headmistress, or dean, as she prefers to call herself, Ford Julianne Westhaven, great-granddaughter several times removed from the founder of The Goode School, arrives in a flurry, her driver, Rumi, braking the family Bentley with a screech one hundred feet away from the gates. The crowd in the street blocks the car and, for a moment, the sight of the dangling girl. No one stops to think about why the dean might be off campus this early in the morning. Not yet, anyway.

Dean Westhaven rushes out of the back of the dove-gray car and runs to the crowd, her face white, lips pressed firmly together, eyes roving. It is a look all the girls at Goode recognize and shrink from.

The dean’s irritability is legendary, outweighed only by her kindness. It is said she alone approves every application to the school, that she chooses the Goode girls by hand for their intelligence, their character. Her say is final. Absolute. But for all her goodness, her compassion, her kindness, Dean Westhaven has a temper.

She begins to gather the girls into groups, small knots of natural blondes and brunettes and redheads, no fantastical dye allowed. Some shiver in oversize school sweatshirts and running shorts, some are still in their pajamas. The dean is looking for the chick missing from her flock. She casts occasional glances over her shoulder at the grim scene behind her. She, too, is unsure of the identity of the body, or so it seems. Perhaps she simply doesn’t want to acknowledge the truth.

The siren grows to an earsplitting shriek and dies midrange, a soprano newly castrated. The deputies from the sheriff’s office have arrived, the sheriff hot on their heels. Within moments, they cordon off the gates, move the students back, away, away. One approaches the body, cataloging; another begins taking discreet photographs, a macabre paparazzi.

They speak to Dean Westhaven, who quietly, breathlessly, admits she hasn’t approached the body and has no idea who it might be.
She is lying, though. She knows. Of course, she knows. It was inevitable.

The sheriff, six sturdy feet of muscle and sinew, approaches the gate and takes a few shots with his iPhone. He reaches for the foot of the dead girl and slowly, slowly turns her around.

The eerie morning silence is broken by the words, soft and gasping, murmurs moving sinuously through the crowd of girls, their feet shuffling in the morning chill, the fog’s tendrils disappearing from around the posts.

They say her name, an unbroken chain of accusation and misery.

Ash.

THE LIES

There are truths, and there are lies, and then there is everything that really happened, which is where you and I will meet. My truth is your lie, and my lie is your truth, and there is a vast expanse between them.

Take, for example, Ash Carlisle.

Six feet tall, glowing skin, a sheaf of blond hair in a ponytail. She wears black jeans with rips in the knees and a loose greenand-white plaid button-down with white Adidas Stan Smiths; casual, efficient travel clothes. A waiter delivers a fresh cup of tea to her nest in the British Airways first-class lounge, and when she smiles her thanks, he nearly drops his tray—so pure and happy is that smile. The smile of an innocent.

Or not so innocent? You’ll have to decide that for yourself. Soon.

She’s perfected that smile, by the way. Practiced it. Stood in the dingy bathroom of the flat on Broad Street and watched herself in the mirror, lips pulling back from her teeth over and over and over again until it becomes natural, until her eyes sparkle and deep dimples appear in her cheeks. It is a full-toothed smile, her teeth straight and blindingly white, and when combined with the china-blue eyes and naturally streaked blond hair, it is devastating.

Isn’t this what a sociopath does? Work on their camouflage? What better disguise is there than an open, thankful, gracious smile? It’s an exceptionally dangerous tool, in the right hands.

And how does a young sociopath end up flying first class, you might ask? You’ll be assuming her family comes from money, naturally, but let me assure you, this isn’t the case. Not at all. Not really. Not anymore.

No, the dean of the school sent the ticket.

Why?

Because Ash Carlisle leads a charmed life, and somehow managed to hoodwink the dean into not only paying her way but paying for her studies this first term, as well. A full scholarship, based on her exemplary intellect, prodigy piano playing, and sudden, extraordinary need. Such a shame she lost her parents so unexpectedly.

Yes, Ash is smart. Smart and beautiful and talented, and capable of murder. Don’t think for a moment she’s not. Don’t let her fool you.
Sipping the tea, she types and thinks, stops to chew on a nail, then reads it again. The essay she is obsessing over gained her access to the prestigious, elite school she is shipping off to. The challenges ahead—transferring to a new school, especially one as impossible to get into as The Goode School—frighten her, excite her, make her more determined than ever to get away from Oxford, from her past.
A new life. A new beginning. A new chapter for Ash.

But can you ever escape your past?

Ash sets down the tea, and I can tell she is worrying again about fitting in. Marchburg, Virginia—population five hundred on a normal summer day, which expands to seven hundred once the students arrive for term—is a long way from Oxford, England. She worries about fitting in with the daughters of the DC elite—daughters of senators and congressmen and ambassadors and reporters and the just plain filthy rich.

She can rely on her looks—she knows how pretty she is, isn’t vain about it, exactly, but knows she’s more than acceptable on the looks scale—and on her intelligence, her exceptional smarts. Some would say cunning, but I think this is a disservice to her. She’s both booksmart and street-smart, the rarest of combinations. Despite her concerns, if she sticks to the story, she will fit in with no issues.
The only strike against her, of course, is me, but no one knows about me.

No one can ever know about me.