Richard Papen moves away from California to attend Hampden college in Vermont, where he's accepted into a small, elite group of 5 other students studying ancient Greek. He quickly becomes part of their every day lives, and begins to discover what secrets they hold.

These secrets ultimately lead to the m*rder of a fellow student, and Richard is as much to blame as the rest of the group.

I know I'm in the minority here, but man, this story was such a bummer. I was thoroughly enjoying it up until about 60% of the way in. The first half of the story was a great build up to what was to come, and Tartt's writing does make the reader feel the tension in a situation. 

 

After the big turning point, where the group m*rdered Bunny, I was under the impression things would be extremely tense as the group tried to maneuver the police and avoided being caught, but instead I was bored and felt like the later chapters started to meander away from the main story.

 

The characters in this story are extremely pretentious, which I've found is pretty common in a lot of academic-type settings, and typically I do enjoy ridiculously unlikable characters. In the first half of the book, it really reminded me of If We Were Villains by M. L. Rio, which is one of my all time favorites. However, it quickly became clear that this was not going to be as fun for me. It felt as though Tartt was not aware of just how pretentious the characters were, and she wanted us to sympathize with them a little, which I did not. I found the majority of them incredibly annoying and one-sided.