Excerpt from The Truants by Kate Weinberg, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

That was the thing about Georgie. She changed tone so fast that your head whirled. Mostly, she was like a slot machine flashing all its lights in constant jackpot, but there was a kindness there, and in amidst the glib, smart chatter, beguiling glimpses of something more tender.

"Ask to be put in the Christie module with me?" she suggested now, from beneath her crooked eye mask. "Wouldn't that be a laugh?"

Georgie was doing joint honors in Philosophy and English. She claimed the Philosophy part was just to make her "sound more attractive," but I already had a strong sense that, despite her air of careless hedonism, she was also whip-smart, secretly studious, and heavily invested in showing her parents-"neglectful narcissists, the pair of them"-just how fucking clever she was.

I nodded. "I did wonder. But it's bound to be full, too."

The other thing that Lorna was renowned for, apart from the cult status of The Truants, was "rescuing" female authors who had been lost or dismissed from the canon as irrelevant. One of these "personal revisionism" courses was on Agatha Christie, about whom, rumor had it, she was now writing a book. When I'd signed up for the modules online I'd looked at Lorna's Christie course, "Murdered by the Campus," with a flicker of longing.

In my early teens, thanks to an old lady I'd visit in Reigate, Stella, I'd read a lot of Agatha Christie out loud. In my later teens, I started reading them for myself-a bit of fun in between more serious books. But although I loved the cat's cradle of the plot, the way the clues and red herrings were stitched together, I knew the characters were thin at best and the themes scant: I couldn't see how even Lorna would make this into an actual undergrad course. So I hadn't hesitated long before clicking on her other module, "The Devil Has the Best Lines."

Excerpted from The Truants by Kate Weinberg. Copyright © 2020 by Kate Weinberg. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.