AJ Dunn Reads

  The Secret History By Donna Tartt Richard Papen arrives at a small Vermont college after a couple years of previous higher education and decides to major in the Classics. The professor in charge of the department insists on a small class size and has certain requirements Richard wouldn't meet to be included. But Richard is cunning and a liar when it suits him, and finds his way into the program. He finds there and clever and eccentric group of misfit students, some rich, some pretending, all with their own foibles. Unbeknownst to Richard, most of the others dabble in the occult as a part of their thirst for knowledge, which leads to an unintended murder. When another student finds out about it and uses it as leverage to get them to spend lavishly on him, they decide to take matters into their own hands and make him disappear. To do this, they bring Richard into the fold and come clean about what they've done. Richard, finding he wants badly to belong to this group, agrees to ...

  The Little Friend By Donna Tartt When she was a baby, Harriet Dufrenes's older brother Robin was murdered. Since then Harriet and her sister Allison have lived a mostly idyllic life in their small town in Mississippi. Sure, their mother Charlotte sleeps most of her days away, but Harriet has her Grandmother Edith and a host of great-aunts who live nearby. She fills her days spending time with them and playing with her friend Hely. But Robin's ghost lingers and no one will tell Harriet anything about the day he was murdered, right in their own yard. Then one day someone lets it slip that a town hoodlum, named Danny Ratliff who comes from a family of bad seeds and who was Robin's age, might be the killer. Harriet searches for a way to get even with him. When she finally lands on a plan it all goes awry when Harriet does something that she can't take back and finds out that her suspicions were wrong. The Little Friend was an exciting read, with the feeling of Ordinary G...