To the Power of Three

The three girls have been inseparable best friends since third grade - Josie, the athletic one; Perri, the brilliant, acerbic drama queen; and Kat the beauty, who also had brains, grace, and a heart open to all around her. But their last day of high school becomes their final day together after one of them brings a gun to school to resolve a mysterious feud. When the police arrive, they discover two wounded girls. The third girl is dead, killed instantly by a shot to the heart.

For the shell-shocked parents, teachers, administrators, and students, healing must begin with answers to the usual questions - but only if the answers are safe ones, answers that will lead back to one girl and one family and absolve everyone else.

For Homicide Sgt. Harold Lenhardt, this case is a mystery with more twists than these grief-stricken suburbanites are willing to acknowledge - and the sole lucid survivor, a girl with a teenager's uncanny knack for stonewalling, strikes him as being less than...

The New York Times - Marilyn Stasio

… what Lippman is really going for here is an analysis of teenage friendship and how cultural pressures can twist it into something so ugly it becomes lethal. She shows great empathy for the smart, fiercely independent Perri, the desperate-to-please Josie, and a few students like Eve Muhly, the ''redneck'' farmer's child whose need for acceptance makes her the perfect victim for vicious peer pranks. Eve might not be in the same social league as Kat, but she carries herself far more believably than that shadowy ideal girl, and whenever she's on the scene, the ritual cruelties of high school take on a savage sting.