Dark Passages: Boarding School Gothic

My newest "Dark Passages" column at the Los Angeles Times looks at the first and most recent books by Carol Goodman, which share an upstate NY, secreted girls' school setting, though THE LAKE OF DEAD LANGUAGES takes it in a different, more classical direction than does ARCADIA FALLS. Here's how the piece opens:

As mystery readers well know, constrained geography ups the likelihood of murder. From John Dickson Carr's mastery of the locked room to Agatha Christie's penchant for country houses to Louise Penny's depiction of nastiness crawling out of the woodwork of one tiny French-Canadian village, death may be bloodless on the page, but secrets possess an even bloodier sense of suppressed rage that is desperate for attention and visibility.

The magical boiling caldron of secrets, unsolved murders and isolation explains the appeal of Carol Goodman's best work -- ironically, being her first and most recent novels, twinned in subject matter and character development. Both "The Lake of Dead Languages," published in 2002, and this month's "Arcadia Falls" (Ballantine: 364 pp., $25) share what should be a dream-like setting of boarding schools situated in towns close enough to the big city of Manhattan but removed enough to suggest earlier time periods, when adolescents were not so technology-dependent and believed in the romance of the heartfelt handwritten diary entry. Both books feature girls on the cusp of womanhood, running the gamut from innocent precocity to succubus-like attraction to dangerous thrills. And both draw heavily from Goodman's knowledge of literary archetypes, from those rooted in the classics to more modern, artistic tropes....

Read on for the rest.

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