The NYT Sunday Magazine recently featured an interview with a woman who said she was a sociopath. Suddenly my feeds were full of articles about how women could be psychopaths, too, and were they worse than male psychopaths, and female serial killer, and all sorts of messy thinking on this topic, masquerading as news and facts.

This book is about a young woman, Chloe, who is a psychopath. On page 1 she arrives at college, and sets out a list of things to do: 1. Get rid of Mom. Check…. 2. Claim the most advantageous space before [her roommate] arrived. 3. Make six to eight friends before [her mandatory appointment at the psychology department later that afternoon]. 4. Find Will. (A guy she stalked back home and followed to college.) How she goes about checking 2, 3, and 4 off her list sets the tone for your interactions with Chloe throughout the rest of the book.

This chick is totally not wired the way most of us are. She is hyper-focused on what she wants, categorizes people quickly and ruthlessly (I didn’t linger long because I knew they would never be key players and her eyes were brown and unafraid), and does whatever it takes to achieve her goals. And if she doesn’t achieve them – fuck Georgetown, the one university that didn’t accept her, because her application was, in her mind, golden – it’s not her fault; it’s the shortcomings of anyone who fails to appreciate her.

Then we are introduced to the reason why this school was so determined to outbid all the other schools to get her: the program, a Multi-method Psychopathology Panel Study. In other words, the psych department has recruited a bunch of psychopaths as students so they can study them. The kids are given smartwatches that track their vitals (heart rate, sleep cycles, location), and it prompts them to enter data in a mood log. They participate in periodic surveys, psych tests involving game theory, and MRIs. It’s all very scientific and private: no one outside key members of the psych staff know that they are psychopaths and the kids don’t even know who the other people in the study are. (Although Chloe theorizes that, if they run into one another, they will recognize it, like wolves sniffing each other out.)

Chloe has an agenda for her time at school, which does not involve learning or academic success. She goes through the motions while she plots her real reason for being there.

And then we meet Andre. Andre is also part of the program. But Andre has a secret. He’s not a psychopath. At least, he doesn’t think he is – he doesn’t want to kill anyone and he’s clearly cut from a different cloth than Chloe. But he really wants to go to college and his family can’t afford it and he’s a young Black man from a bad neighborhood and his school guidance counselor did label him with conduct disorder…

But then Chloe and Andre’s plans are interrupted by the murder of one of the other members of the program. Who did it? Was it someone in the program? And are they hunting down everyone else in the program? Why?

As the blame shifts, Chloe is certain – and persuades you – that it’s each person in turn, only to suspect later that she was wrong. She is constantly being put into greater and greater danger by her certainty that she is smarter than everyone else.

Here’s the thing that makes this book great: when you watch Dexter or Saul Goodman, you’re watching from the outside. You’re never quite sure what they’re thinking. You get sucked into what they say about what they are doing and that makes them sympathetic characters that you root for, even while you are appalled by the crimes they commit, the havoc that they wreak. They leave you conflicted. So conflicted that I had to stop watching Dexter after a handful of episodes.

But with Chloe, while you see her perspective, you are not rooting for her to win. There is no sympathy to Chloe: she is that bitch at work who pretended to be your friend then turned against you when she got what she wanted and made it her purpose to bring you down. You don’t want to be Chloe’s friend. She uses people, denigrates people she finds threatening or of no use to her, and she takes without giving. There is really nothing redeemable about Chloe.

Except she’s not the murderer that is killing off the program members.

She’s not above murder, as she makes clear early in the book. She just doesn’t have a reason to want these people dead – they are nothing to her.

This book is worth reading. I may even read it again some day, because I enjoyed it. Kurian won an Edgar for it. And she deserves it.

What I really liked best about this book was closing it at the end and knowing that Chloe was safely imprisoned between the covers.

And not out here with me.