On its own, this oddly circumstantial triangle seems to promise a tortuous tale of parallels and reversals: the wide-eyed ingenue, the beautiful and mysterious academic with her own murky past, and the presiding spirit of Agatha, renowned for her brilliantly twisty plotting and her nonpareil expertise in poisons both familiar and recondite. The resulting furor among Agatha’s fans blew up into quite the frenzy among contemporary English journalists. It has never been fully explained, although her husband’s adultery has been said to figure somehow.

Mystery maven Agatha, another focus of Jess’ beguilement, looms large in the story, partly by reason of Agatha’s strange - and real-life - two-week disappearance in 1926. Lately resigned from the University of Cambridge, the beautiful Lorna, it turns out, has been driven to the academic hinterlands by a shadowy scandal, its precise details unknown. Lorna Clay, an expert on rebellious woman writers and, significantly, Agatha Christie. Jess has enrolled at the University of East Anglia, an educational backwater in elite British eyes. The Truants opens affectionately enough, nudged on by the minor tremors of post-adolescent infatuation in Jess Walker, its impressionable narrator. All of them intertwine to great effect in a cleverly constructed tale of passionate duplicity, mysterious absences, and sudden death. This impressive debut from Kate Weinberg is a collegiate coming-of-age story entangled in a snarl of secretive goings on - some nearly a century old, others a few years past, and a few chillingly present.

The truants by kate weinberg