MURDER AT THE HIGH SCHOOL REUNION

The 25th reunion of South Portland (Maine) High School’s class of 2000 is highlighted by all the snark and pettiness you’d expect, plus homicide.

Tawny Bryce, the queen bee of the group, wants to celebrate the occasion by hiring classmates Sandra Wallage and Maya Kendrick, who run a private detective agency, to get the goods on Chad Bryce, her politically ambitious husband, whom she’s convinced is cheating on her. Maya’s first attempt to follow Chad to an amatory hookup goes disastrously wrong, but the detective duo manage to get a damning video of Chad and 23-year-old Lindsay Buckman thanks to the hands-on assistance of Alyssa Turner, the mousy classmate who’s blossomed into a bona fide Hollywood star—and who also promises to be the star of the reunion. Alyssa is upstaged when the furious Tawny sneaks the compromising footage into a playlist of videos shown at the reunion and then has her husband served with divorce papers in front of the rapt crowd. Chad predictably goes ballistic and runs away, and shortly thereafter Tawny is found strangled to death. Det. Beth Hart, Maya’s former colleague on the South Portland PD, isn’t exactly eager for Sandra and Maya’s help. But no one’s more likely to sort through the dislike, jealousy, and thwarted romantic longings that have festered among their classmates ever since they were stuck together in high school. For better or worse, they identify a likely suspect only two-thirds of the way through the story, and thereafter the mode shifts from catty whodunit to suspenseful pursuit, a genre Hollis doesn’t handle with nearly as much authority.

If you needed another reason to skip your own reunion, here it is.