Red Leaves

Flamingo, 1998. Paperback. Very Good. After her heralded but somewhat overwritten first novel, Tully, Simons has sharpened her craftsmanship to produce this suspenseful work about four fri ends at Dartmouth College whose close relationship is coming apart. The dis integration doesn't appear mortal, but it is. During a cold Thanksgiving we ekend and its aftermath, Kristina, Jim, Conni and Albert study, play and oc casionally sleep together, passionately addicted to each other's company. W hen Kristina's nude and frozen body is found in a snowbank, having been con cealed there for some days, young small-town detective Spencer O'Malley inv estigates her death. He is drawn into the group's games and lies just as he was drawn to Kristina's compelling liveliness when he met her the day befo re she was killed. Why did her best friends fail to report her missing? The ir answers to his fervent questions reveal a network of hidden secrets and jealousies that have long existed among them. But the hardly surprising sol ution to the crime doesn't appear until three years later, when the full si gnificance of the title becomes clear. The narrative has striking similarit ies to the events in Donna Tartt's The Secret History, but Simons is not as fluent a writer, nor does the plot carry the philosophical resonance of Ta rtt's more sophisticated work. Yet Simons handles her characters and settin g (both the New Hampshire campus and the moneyed neighborhoods of Greenwich , Conn.) with a certain skill, creating mystery from the ordinary, protecte d lives of these Ivy League kids, slowly peeling away their deceptions to r eveal denial, cowardice and chilling indifference. In doing so, she tells a.