Adrienne Cross spent four years on scholarship at a small, cold, ferociously selective liberal-arts college in New England, where she learned classical Greek, the exact social distance between a scholarship and a legacy, and how quickly a beautiful institution closes over an inconvenient truth. She has been writing about that water ever since.

Raised outside Worcester, Massachusetts, by a high-school Latin teacher and a night-shift nurse, Adrienne was the first in her family to go to a college with a Latin motto, and the culture shock of that threshold — the envelopes, the dinners, the casual certainty of people who had never once worried about belonging — became the obsession underneath her fiction. She went on to a decade of teaching secondary English and coaching a very good, very cutthroat quiz-bowl team, which taught her everything she needed to know about brilliant young people and the things they will do to win.

Her Ravenscar novels are for readers who reread The Secret History for the sentences as much as the crime: dark academia mysteries about translation societies, ornamental lakes, and the outsiders whose hunger to be let in is the real mystery. The Greek is accurate, the dread is earned, and nobody at Ravenscar is innocent, least of all the narrator.

Adrienne lives in western Massachusetts with her partner, a rare-books conservator whose work she cheerfully plunders for plot, a wall of annotated paperbacks, and a black cat named Ovid who is, she insists, an unreliable narrator in his own right. She still owns her college Greek lexicon and still cannot walk past an ornamental pond without checking it.