It's Always the Husband

Finished May 25
It's Always the Husband by Michele Campbell, read by January LaVoy

This psychological suspense novel follows three college roommates from very different backgrounds. The girls meet at the beginning of their first year at Carlisle College in New Hampshire. Aubrey is a poor girl from Vegas who has made it to college on her marks. She is hoping to make the contacts to lead her to a life beyond the one she experienced up until now. Jenny is a local girl who has always had an eye towards her future, making the right connections, getting good grades, and planning ahead. Kate is the spoiled rich girl, whose daddy is one of the board members at the college and a major donor. Too bad that she no longer has a great relationship with her father.
As the girls go through their first year, they become friends despite their differences, hanging out together often enough that they become known as the Whipple triplets after the dorm that they live in. Aubrey hero worships Kate in a way that Jenny finds disturbing, and that and family issues lead to her grades slipping significantly. Kate becomes the campus party girl, indulging in alcohol, drugs, and sex at the expense of her courses. Jenny is still the go getter, getting a part-time job in the provost's office and finding herself agreeing to something that she should know better than to do, but that she believes will lead to a better future for herself.
As the year goes on and the antics grow wilder, including a ill-fated spring break trip, things culminate in a tense scene at an abandoned railway bridge in the woods, and someone dies. What really happened that night is hushed up and the girls go their separate ways. But twenty years later, Jenny is the town mayor married to a local boy, Aubrey is a new age yoga teacher married to a less than loyal doctor, and Kate is back in town as a result of her husband's father being caught in financial fraud. And this time around the girls aren't so friendly with each other. This is a story more psychological than action-based, and definitely a who-done-it question on a death that occurs in the present world. With lots of twists and turns, and plenty of motives, you won't be sure who to believe.