College can be a scary place. So imagine that you’re a freshman, a bright young woman, an honor student --- and a psychopath bent on revenge. Okay, then maybe college will be a bit more interesting. Now imagine you’re also in a special program with others like you --- people who have no real moral compass, no conscience, no sense of guilt or remorse.

Chloe Sevre is one of those students. She’s also beautiful, driven and confident to a fault. Most importantly, she has an agenda --- a highly dangerous one. Chloe could have gotten into any number of prestigious colleges, but she chose John Adams University specifically, all because of Will Bachman. Will did something several years ago that was so terrible that Chloe’s sole purpose now is revenge. Not just revenge, but the ultimate revenge. She plans to kill him.

"Kurian’s background in psychology shines through in Chloe; she could hardly come across as more authentic. She may be pretty on the outside, but trust me, you don’t want to meet her. However, you do want to read about her."

From her first day on campus, Chloe begins meticulously endearing herself to targeted students, building an alibi, buttering up key players and manipulating the other psychopaths in order to successfully pull off her scheme. For a while, it all seems to be going well. But then her plot is foiled when one of the other students in the program is murdered. Worse, he’s just the first. It appears that John Adams may have a serial killer on campus. This is not how it was supposed to work. Chloe was meant to be the stalker, not the prey.

Who dared to mess with her plans? This new development has Chloe seeing red. She already has wormed her way into getting Charles --- a hunky fellow psychopath with a girlfriend who Chloe wouldn’t mind getting rid of --- to trust her. Or at least as much as one psychopath trusts another. The idea is to eliminate whoever they can as the possible killer and narrow down the suspects to just one. Do that, and Chloe will then take care of it. But she forgot one very important thing: psychopaths don’t think like other people --- not even like other psychopaths --- which means that she may not be staying one step ahead of this killer.

The student body has politics and protests to contend with in addition to a killer among them. The school mood differs from campuses around the country because the story is set in Washington, DC. Sirens often blare, and police constantly divert traffic for motorcades and dignitaries. The setting also makes this thriller the best it can possibly be. If the book took place anywhere else, it would be tougher for the psychopaths to sneak around, blend in and ultimately carry out their dark deeds.

Author Vera Kurian takes us inside Chloe's mind, a place that can be highly unnerving. Chloe is a college girl, yes, but a college girl with a murderous plot who will think nothing of dispatching a man who did her wrong. Once Will has been dealt with, she intends to heave a sigh of relief and get back to her studies. Goal accomplished; move on. That’s a frightening mindset for those of us who aren’t psychopaths.

Kurian’s background in psychology shines through in Chloe; she could hardly come across as more authentic. She may be pretty on the outside, but trust me, you don’t want to meet her. However, you do want to read about her.