When undergrad Jay Kemp was killed on campus, Detective Marlitt Kaplan was the first one on the scene. She had been talking to her mother in her mother’s office at the University of Georgia in Athens, where she was a professor. Marlitt had heard the collision and gone running down to the street. She found the UGA junior lying in the street, in a pool of blood.
When she started talking to the witnesses, she found that a lot of them were saying that the driver had been a young man. He had looked remarkably like the victim. He hadn’t braked. And he had been smiling when he hit Jay.
Marlitt had grown up around the university, so she knew her way around campus. She understood how the students interacted. She understood the Greek system, so when she found out that Kemp was a Kappa Phi Omicron, Marlitt wanted to dig into the fraternity. She’s heard all the stories about the problematic Greek life on campus. She’s seen it on the news. She knows about the underage drinking, the sexual assaults, the hazing. The deaths of kids just wanting to fit in and have fun with their friends.
Is that what this is, another Greek-related tragedy, or is just an accident? Marlitt’s partner and their lieutenant think that she is too focused on the fraternity, but she just can’t let it go. She questions the brothers and takes a tour of Kappa house. As part of the investigation, they look at Kemps’ phone records and laptop. They talk to his roommate and his girlfriend. They can’t find anything that directly links any of the Kappa brothers to Jay’s death.
And then one night, Marlitt wakes up to find her bedroom on fire. She is recued in the nick of time and spends time in the hospital. At first, she drifts in and out of consciousness. It takes her days before she can remember anything of what happened. She struggles to make sense of it. She thinks she remembers voices before she woke up with her hair on fire, but she can’t be sure. She was told that when she was rescued she was speaking German. Clearly, there is more going on with this accident than meets the eye.
As Marlitt struggles to recover, and then to try to get back to her investigation, she is plagued by questions about Jay, about the Kappas, and even about her own family. Will she be able to find the pieces she needs to make sense of it all, or will she be broken by this investigation and her own personal demons?
The Resemblance is the fiction debut from former professor Lauren Nossett. It is a powerful, emotional look at life on a college campus, particularly in a fraternity. It’s a smart and political look at the secret society in Greek life, and how they are often sheltered by campus and even local politics. This story is layered with secrets and betrayals, the darkness that is the worst of human nature and the way we try to protect those closest to us from that darkness.
I listened to The Resemblance on audio, narrated by Saskia Maarleveld, who did a beautiful job with this story. The story itself is troubling. It’s troubling in part because it’s a mystery where the solution is unclear, where justice is not done, and where the future is murky. It is powerful, and it is a story worth spending some time with. But it is also painful and complicated and demands a lot of the reader. It’s not a light read, but it’s filled with important questions about what exactly we are teaching our kids at college and how we can do better by future generations. Dark and twisted, but also revealing and thought-provoking.
A copy of the audiobook for The Resemblance was provided by Macmillan Audio through NetGalley, with many thanks.
