Straitlaced Irish university student Taz travels to the Continent to study abroad for a year. She chooses Italy because she speaks Italian, and Grifonia because it has a reputation for safety, but the city's history is actually steeped in blood all the way back to its Etruscan days. Taz doesn't know about the innocent girls who have lost their lives in Grifonia over the centuries or their brutal ends.
At first, Taz studies and goes on excursions to historic sites, but soon she runs into Jenny, a classmate from back home. Jenny and her friends Anna and Luka exude beauty, confidence and money, and middle-class Taz is surprised but grateful when they draw her into their clique. Taz's free-spirited American roommate, Claire, doesn't trust Jenny. And while Taz soon learns her new friends have ulterior motives, she's just as dubious about sensual, overly familiar Claire. Taz's loyalties are further confused when she and Claire wind up with uncomfortably overlapped love lives.
While novelist Katie Crouch (Girls in Trucks) is transparently inspired by the Amanda Knox trials, her plot isn't as ripped from the headlines as readers may initially expect. Though the crime and its fallout are the climax and coda of a journey through drugs, sex and scandal, Crouch's real focus is the dark side of female friendship. Call this the antithesis of chick lit: Crouch explores the simultaneous affection and envy that characterize the so-called frenemy relationship. By turns tender, cutting and brutal, Abroad captures a fascinating vortex of toxic love. --Jaclyn Fulwood, blogger at Infinite Reads