Book Review | They Never Learn

My first book of the year and what a book to start with.

They Never Learn
Layne Fargo

Scarlett Clark is an exceptional English professor. But she’s even better at getting away with murder.

Every year, Dr. Clark searches for the worst man at Gorman University—professor, student, or otherwise—and plots his well-deserved demise. Thanks to her meticulous planning, she’s avoided drawing attention to herself…but as she’s preparing for her biggest kill yet, the school starts probing into the growing body count on campus. Determined to keep her enemies close, Dr. Clark insinuates herself into the investigation and charms the woman in charge. Everything’s going according to her master plan…until she loses control with her latest victim, putting her secret life at risk of exposure.

Meanwhile, Gorman student Carly Schiller is just trying to survive her freshman year. Finally free of her emotionally abusive father, all Carly wants is to focus on her studies and fade into the background. Her new roommate has other ideas. Allison Hadley is cool and confident—everything Carly wishes she could be—and the two girls quickly form an intense friendship. So when Allison is sexually assaulted at a party, Carly becomes obsessed with making the attacker pay…and turning her fantasies about revenge into a reality.

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They Never Learn was a book club pick and I might not have chosen it otherwise but I really enjoyed it. This is the kind of book that if you don’t think much past the surface level then it’s brilliant, once we got into a discussion of it there were a few things that flagged up but it didn’t drastically change my mind about it.

The pace in this book is amazing, the chapters are short and change between Scarlett’s POV and Carly’s POV, so it constantly had that just one more chapter feeling to it. I was hooked from the first page, because it gets straight into the action with Scarlett’s latest kill, and I really didn’t want to put it down .

I found myself rooting for Scarlett the whole way through the story, even though what she is doing is terrible, in some respects it is fun seeing these despicable men getting what’s coming to them. I was a bit unsure of Carly at first, in comparison to Scarlett’s chapters, she wasn’t as captivating at first, but as the book progresses she does become less of a pushover and I was glad to see how fiercely protective she was of her friend.

There were a few pretty interesting twists in the story, one that I didn’t see coming, I did feel a bit silly that it surprised me as much as it did, and one that I felt didn’t make sense but did make for some exciting reading. In retrospect I wish we had gotten a little more depth from both of these characters and that Scarlett’s motivation for what she does was a little stronger, but as I said it didn’t stifle my satisfaction too much while reading.