MYSTERY: MEAN-GIRL SAGA
The Sixes by Kate White (Harper)
Mean girls seldom grow out of their meanness; they just find more sophisticated or sneaky ways to bully others. Anyone who watches Bravo’s “Real Housewives” franchise knows what happens to mean girls when they become women.
Mean women, making life miserable for anyone who crosses them at an elite private college, abound in Kate White’s highly entertaining “The Sixes.” White, editor in chief of Cosmopolitan magazine, delivers a superior mix of romantic suspense and pure mystery while avoiding cliches.
“The Sixes” works well as an academic mystery, a women’s novel and an insular village mystery with the private school standing in for a small town.
If anyone would be ripe for the machinations of mean girls it would be Phoebe Hall. But Phoebe has come to Lyle College as a teacher, not a student, and that should put her above the gossipy antics in this small Pennsylvania town. It should, but it doesn’t.
Phoebe, the author of several best-selling celebrity biographies, has had a bad year. Her long-term boyfriend has left her and she’s been falsely accused of plagiarizing her latest book. An offer to teach at this college where her close friend, Glenda Johns, is its president sounds like a cure-all. But no one is above the sniping along the grapevine and Phoebe’s past is too juicy to be ignored.
When one of the students is found dead, Phoebe is asked by Glenda to look into the rumor that the young woman was targeted by the super-secret club The Sixes. But do The Sixes even exist, or is this a rumor too? Phoebe’s ability to interview people — and get them to tell her their deepest secrets — uncovers other deaths and a few ruined lives that appear to be linked to The Sixes.
White keeps “The Sixes” on a steady keel as she builds secret upon secret while showing that these rumors hint of a group that might not even exist. The college’s idyllic atmosphere is the perfect setting for illustrating that evil can exist beneath a placid surface.
Phoebe is an intriguing heroine — willing to put herself on the line even if her unofficial investigation will put her back in the limelight or, even worse, bring back memories of a tragedy from her own time at a boarding school. Phoebe’s burgeoning relationship with Duncan Shaw, a psychology professor, is deftly handled.
As she does with her Bailey Weggins series, White shows her affinity for tension-laden plots with “The Sixes.”
