Lauren Nossett’s artfully written debut, The Resemblance is an exhilarating, atmospheric campus thriller reminiscent of The Secret History and The Likeness.
Intrigued? Well read on to discover the synopsis and an excerpt from The Resemblance by Lauren Nossett, which is out November 8th 2022!
Never betray the brotherhood.
On a chilly November morning at the University of Georgia, a fraternity brother steps off a busy crosswalk and is struck dead by an oncoming car. More than a dozen witnesses all agree on two things: The driver looked identical to the victim, and he was smiling.
Detective Marlitt Kaplan is first on the scene. An Athens native and the daughter of a UGA professor, she knows all its shameful histories, from the skull discovered under the foundations of Baldwin Hall to the hushed-up murder-suicide in Waddel. But in the course of investigating this hit-and-run, she will uncover more chilling secrets as she explores the sprawling, interconnected Greek system that entertains and delights the university’s most elite and connected students.
The lines between Marlitt’s policework and her own past increasingly blur as Marlitt seeks to bring to justice an institution that took something precious from her many years ago. When threats against her escalate, and some long-buried secrets threaten to come to the surface, she can’t help but question whether the corruption in Athens has run off campus and into the force and how far these brotherhoods will go to protect their own.
“What can you tell me?”
“Student. White male. Late teens, early twenties. Hit-and-run. Died on impact or very shortly thereafter.”
Aisha nods and sweeps her long black hair into a tight bun. At first, she walks the perimeter, scanning the roads in both directions. Then she paces the length of the crosswalk, times the change of the light from green to yellow, yellow to red. Notes the split second between the red light and white walking man.
I know better than to break her concentration. She takes photographs of everything—the body, the asphalt, the dozen or so students pressed against the orange barricade. Then her sketchbook appears, and a video camera. Someone will construct 360-degree images of the scene, so once the body’s gone, the road cleaned up, and the students dispersed, we can return to this moment again and again. She still hasn’t touched anything, and I know she’s going to murder me when she sees the blood on my sleeve and learns how close I was to the body.
It doesn’t matter that it’s a hit-and-run, Aisha’s still going to look for fingermarks, hairs, and fibers. Her movements are slow and intentional as she makes her way around the body, collects and tags potential evidence, packaging it in plastic bags and vials so nothing’s disturbed on its way to the lab. Every gesture is methodical. No exhale of sympathy, no headshake at the wasted youth. I could watch her all day, but the students on the steps in front of the learning center are getting anxious.
There are twenty or so of them, and two in the front watch me pace back and forth like puppies following the trajectory of a ball. The rest hunker down against backpacks and stare at their phones. An odd group; some are still wearing pajamas although the day is creeping toward noon, hair disheveled on purpose—freshmen relishing the sudden lack of dress code and parental input. The girls wear a collection of high-waisted jeans and T-shirts; the guys shuffle back and forth in their shorts and different shades of the same polos or university tees. One of them, a boy with a hoodie pulled low over his face, keeps muttering to himself and making me uneasy.
I sigh. The more times they repeat this story to friends in class and the dining halls, the more they’re going to start embellishing, filling in blanks, and believing their own half-truths. It’s the same reason it’s going to take a lot more than me being first on the scene for Truman to let me have this case.
In my peripheral, an orange stretcher appears with a white cover. He’s been dead for twenty minutes now, but there’s no way Aisha will move him in a body bag. Students circle the barricade hyena-like, snapping photos with their cell phones. I can almost feel Aisha wishing the guy had been stabbed in an apartment or moved to the basement of a building so she could conduct her investigation in private.
“Hello,” I yell to get their attention. “I’m Detective Kaplan, and this is Detective White. You were all witnesses to a hit-and-run this morning. We need to talk to each of you.”
There are instant grumbles.
“I have a test at one,” a girl with wide eyes yelps.
“We’ve got practice this afternoon,” two uncommonly tall boys say in sync.
I take a deep breath and resist the urge to smack them. Behind me, a body’s being loaded unnecessarily into an ambulance, and they’re worried about class and their sports team.
“I’m sure you all have places to be,” Teddy says diplomatically before I can tell them just how fucked up their perspectives are. “But this takes priority.” He looks at me, an upward turn at the corner of his lips. “Detective Kaplan will write each of you notes, stating you were needed for a police investigation.”
Asshole, I think, but it’s half-hearted, and I give a reassuring nod to the students.
Most are appeased by this, but the wide-eyed girl presses a notebook to her chest and mutters peevishly, “But I’ve been studying all night.”
I take the boy in the hoodie. His energy is making me nervous, and I can’t tell if that’s because he knows something or is just a weird kid. Either way, I want him out of my sight.
Teddy will talk to the girls. With his chiseled jaw and wide smile, he has the extra talent of making people squirm under his attention, but his calm, easy going attitude wins him their confidence. This doesn’t always work. There’s a type—usually forty- to eighty-year-old white males and sixtyish white females—who regard him with suspicion, the former with racially charged, sometimes homophobic slurs (Teddy’s Black, not gay, but racists and homophobes seem to share hate in common) and purse clutching by the latter.
College women, though, love Teddy.
Generously, he picks the notebook-clutching girl. “We’ll see if we can’t get you to your test on time.” He smiles, and some of the stiffness goes out of her shoulders.
I, on the other hand, have to keep a straight face, or no one will take me seriously.
“Name?” I ask, positioning myself squarely in front of hoodie-boy.
“Tom Jones.”
“Seriously?”
He gives me a blank, petulant stare, and I see his pale skin is pock-marked, like the dotted and scratched surface of a student desk. I think of my mother with her generational complaints—he probably doesn’t know who Indiana Jones is, I think, never mind Tom Jones.
“All right, Tom, tell me what you saw—and start from the beginning. What direction were you walking? Who was next to you? What did the car look like?”
“What about what I had for breakfast?”
“Sure,” I say magnanimously. “Let’s start there.”
He rolls his eyes and mutters something about not eating breakfast.
The interview is a complete waste of time. He didn’t see anything. Not the car. Not the driver. Looked up just when our victim collided with the ground.
For a split second, a wave of panic washes over his face—like he’s just realized what happened.
“I think he was—is he—dead?”
I click my pen. “Thank you, Tom Jones. You’ve been very helpful.”
He wasn’t, but I don’t have the same issue with lying as Teddy.
As he trudges away, I sense a change in the air. I turn to see Aisha closing the rear doors to the ambulance. She’s still wearing latex gloves as she taps the side of the vehicle. It speeds off, sirens roaring, although the guy’s no longer in a hurry to get anywhere.
I feel a rush of relief. Not because of the gawkers—they’ll linger as long as the crime scene tape’s in place—but because now I can finally concentrate. This whole time I’ve had one eye on the body, mindful of its presence as I ask questions and take notes, aware of the gradual cooling of its internal temperature, gravity pulling blood to the skin closest to the ground as I scan the crowd for outliers, but it’s not my problem anymore.
I stuff my hands in my pockets and turn toward the street.
I spent my whole life on this campus, straining against my mother’s grasp to watch tall cranes and men in hard hats build the Ramsey Center, later getting drunk outside her building and glaring as another group expanded the student learning center, bulldozed a parking lot, built a garage; the landscape ever changing, the skyline interrupted by new buildings, but always people shuffling to and from classes, a kaleidoscope of sounds and colors, the streets full of energy and life. Now, students trudge up Baxter Hill casting curious looks backward, faces peer down from the redbrick dining hall on the corner, and an outline of a dead boy glints in the middle of the gray asphalt.
I turn back to the students on the steps and withdraw a weepy, curly haired girl from under the sheltering wing of a boy, who looks embarrassed and uncomfortable. It’s clear he doesn’t know what to do with her blubbering, but two decades of training in southern-style chivalry have left him with no other option than putting his arm around her shoulder. He blinks at me when I call her over, and his relief is so palpable I almost laugh.
“Name?”
“Morgan Walker,” she says between sniffs.
“All right, Morgan,” I say kindly. “This is important. I need you to tell me everything that happened. Did you go to class this morning?”
She nods tearfully. “I have a nine a.m. biology class with Dr. Cho.” She adds the last bit hopefully like I might know the professor.
When I don’t say anything, she takes a deep breath and wipes under her eyelashes with her fingertips, smudging mascara across her cheeks like inky feathers.
“And . . . I was really tired and kept falling asleep in class . . . so I went to the student learning center to grab a coffee.” She gestures to the building behind her. “But when I got there, I just felt so heavy, and, I don’t know, I didn’t think coffee would help, and even though I have another class at eleven forty-five, I thought it would be better to take a nap.”
“So you were walking back to your dorm?”
She bobs her head like I’ve just thrown her a lifeline.
“I live in Brumby. Up the hill?”
It’s suddenly dawned on her that I’m not a student or a professor and that I might not know everything about campus life. And I don’t. But I know Brumby’s the all-women’s dorm that’s a calf-strengthening walk from the bottom of Baxter, past the shiny new Gameday Center and dilapidated rows of public housing. Nothing useful yet, but I make a note.
“And so I was tired, but I was trying to hurry so I could get at least thirty minutes of sleep. And there were a bunch of people waiting—probably to go to Bolton for breakfast. And I saw Jay—he was standing right in front of me.”
My head snaps up. “Jay?”
“The boy . . . who . . . who was hit.”
“You knew him?”
She nods, and her cheeks, still wet with tears, redden.
“I didn’t know him, know him. I just—I’ve seen him around at parties and stuff. He’s a Kap-O and his frat does things with my sorority . . .” She points to the blue letters on her T-shirt.
I’m scribbling as fast as I can.
“Jay . . . ,” I say, scratching my mouth with the side of my pen. “Do you know his last name?”
She hesitates but then shakes her head.
“And what was Jay doing before he was hit?”
She scrunches her nose like she’s trying to remember, but I have the feeling she was watching him carefully.
“He was looking at his phone and, I don’t know, kind of laughing, I think. But I was behind him,” she says quickly. “So I could only see his back. But it was shaking like he was laughing.”
She’s right about the phone. I saw it a few feet away from the body, screen shattered, with glass that looked like ice crystals.
“And then?”
“And then there was a gap in the cars. The light was still green, but not everyone waits for the crossing sign—and he looked up . . . and I guess he figured that the black car was still pretty far away . . . I almost followed him, but then . . . I saw—” She takes a deep breath. “Instead of slowing down—the light had turned yellow—it looked like the car was speeding up . . . and so I hesitated . . . and I almost called out to him . . . but I—” She buries her face in her hands and her voice is muffled by her palms. “I didn’t. And the car—” Her shoulders shake, and when she opens her mouth, spit clings to the corners. “He flew up in the air, and the driver . . . the driver looked . . . he looked happy. And then he sped off. And Jay was . . . all twisted and—”
“Looked happy?” I repeat, interrupting her.
She uncovers her face and blinks at me like she just remembered I was there. A breeze lifts her curls. Behind her, students filter in and out of the double glass doors, shouldering backpacks and laughing. A cluster of guys in sweatpants yell to the one who broke away from the group.
She furrows her brow. “Yeah,” she says. “He was smiling.”
“Smiling.” I hesitate. I’ve seen traffic camera footage from hit-and-run incidents. Often the driver looks surprised, horrified, or in shock, caught in a motion of trying to turn or slam on the brakes, shoulders tensed, eyes wide, mouth formed into a large O. But smiling—that’s a new one.
“You’re sure?”
She nods. “Like it was the best day of his life.”
I frown. Tap my notebook.
“You said ‘he.’ So the driver was male. Did you get a good look at his face?”
The line between her eyes deepens.
“Yeah, but—”
“But what?”
She takes a tight little breath and tugs on her backpack, hands balled into tiny fists.
“It doesn’t make any sense.”
Excerpted from THE RESEMBLANCE by Lauren Nossett. Copyright © 2022 by Lauren Nossett. Excerpted by permission of Flatiron Books, a division of Macmillan Publishers. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
