Fitting-In Has Never Been So Deadly
“Before you judge me, remember this: a girl died, but it wasn’t my fault.”
So begins the tantalizing narrative in award-winning author Lizzy Barber’s newest domestic thriller, OUT OF HER DEPTH.
London resident Rachel Bailey has always been middle-class. She’s a 40-ish French and Italian language teacher at an exclusive all-girls private school in London. But that summer before college showed her another side of life—one filled with luxury and privilege.
Over 20 years before, when teen Rachel arrives at the posh Villa Medici in Florence, Italy, she can’t believe she’ll be spending four months there, doing light housekeeping for the stay of a lifetime. She doesn’t realize that what happens that summer will damage her life forever.
Upon her arrival at the villa, Rachel meets charismatic Diana, another girl working there for the summer. It thrills Rachel to be in Diana’s orbit. She’s beautiful and self-confident. And wealthy. When Rachel meets Sebastian—a young man summering in Florence who shares Diana’s experience of getting what he wants, when he wants it—she can’t help but fall for him. But when he chooses someone else, Diana is more than happy to join forces with Rachel to make him pay.
And a girl ends up dead.
Now, 21 years later, Rachel and Sebastian have suffered from what happened that summer, but Diana leads a glamorous and entitled life. It’s not fair that she escaped the trauma that forever changed the shape of Rachel’s and Sebastian’s lives. Diana consumes Rachel. It’s a “demon inside her demanding to be fed.” But can she get Diana to admit what she did all those years ago?
Read the rest of my review and author interview in The Big Thrill.
