Why You'll Love This
Rachel could have stopped it — and now she's the one investigating the murder she may have helped cause.
- Great if you want: a guilt-driven mystery tangled in old rivalries and buried secrets
- The experience: slow and introspective — more psychological reckoning than thriller
- The writing: Russo leans into moral ambiguity, resisting easy redemption arcs
- Skip if: you want momentum — pacing is deliberate and ratings reflect the divide
About This Book
Some guilt arrives quietly, in the hours after a wrong word or a cold shoulder. For Rachel Nardelli, it arrives the morning after she watches Alison Petrucci walk away—and Alison turns up dead. Set in a small Maine town where everyone knows whose family owns what and whose daughter matters most, Until Alison excavates the particular cruelty of female rivalry: the slights that calcify into something permanent, the old wounds that never quite close. Rachel's investigation into the murder becomes inseparable from her investigation into herself, and Kate Russo makes clear that the two are equally dangerous.
What distinguishes this novel as a reading experience is Russo's unflinching attention to the psychology of complicity—the way ordinary people talk themselves out of accountability in real time. The prose stays close to Rachel's interiority without letting her off the hook, creating a tension that quietly accumulates across every chapter. Russo also has a sharp sense of place; Pleasant Pond and Waterbury feel lived-in rather than scenic. Readers drawn to stories about memory, culpability, and the long aftermath of adolescent wounds will find this one lingers.