Never Saw Me Coming by Vera Kurian

Park Row, 400 pages, $27.99

I had just finished reading “The Man Who Died Twice,” the second in the Thursday Murder Club series, before I started “Never Saw Me Coming.” The Thursday Murder Club books have senior citizens as the main characters. In many ways, “Never Saw Me Coming” provides the antithesis to those senior characters. The protagonists of “Never Saw Me Coming” are college students. The Thursday gang are quirky and oddly talented. The students are diagnosed psychopaths taking part in a study by a college professor, and they are quirky and oddly talented. The psychopaths may have committed crimes in their past, but now they must identify someone who is trying to kill them. It is the Thursday Murder Club seen through a warped glass to produce the Psychopaths of John Adams University.

I remember swearing I’d never read another book about a group of college students as the main characters. Why? Because the stories all seemed to be about someone betraying someone else, probably because one of the someones was sleeping with the other someone’s boyfriend, or someone was drunk and accidentally killed another student, or some deep, somber secret casts a pall over everyone and everything. Dark passions, guilty thoughts, gloom. Some of those books are good, but there is a general tone of pall-casting that became more than I could endure without a major break in reading books of that nature.

So why did I begin reading “Never Saw Me Coming”? I read a favorable review. There were psychopaths. That’s all I needed to try at least a few pages, which became a few more pages. Et voilà!

John Adams University is in Washington, D.C. The action takes place at the time of the Lafayette Square and other protests. The January 6th insurrection has not yet happened, but the atmosphere around the country, as manifested by the several D.C. protests, is ramping up. The book, I hasten to add, is not about politics or about the protests. That is the backdrop author Vera Kurian cleverly uses to encase her story. As the tenor of the protests becomes more frenetic, so does the violence and fear surrounding the on-campus murders.

“Fear” is the wrong word there. Psychopaths do not feel fear per se. According to the book, they do not have affect, they are narcissistic, they have no empathy, they are smart. Professor of psychology Leonard Wyman has a long-term study going in which he tries to help psychopaths overcome these social shortcomings. Promising young people are identified and offered scholarships to attend Adams University. For several of the current group in Wyman’s study, this is a life saver.

Chloe Sevre, we soon find out, is a made-up name. She is a freshman at Adams because of Wyman’s scholarship offer. She also is on a mission to kill another Adams student, Will. The why of that is tantalizingly teased out through the first few chapters. She treats her goal as a Mission: Impossible venture. At the end of sixty days, Will will be dead and Chloe will have killed him. The chapter headings are a countdown of those dwindling days.

Although the seven students in Wyman’s study are not supposed to know each other, they each have to wear a black Apple watch to provide information for research. And that’s one way smart psychopaths identify each other.

Chloe initially befriends (but do psychopaths truly have “friends”) Charles, a rich kid who could have gotten into an Ivy League school but is instead at second-tier Adams. Charles, we are led to believe, is there because he wants to modify his psychopathic tendencies and learn to live as a “normal” person. Charles belongs to the same fraternity as Will. The plot thickens.

Andre is another student in the study, but we learn early on that he is not a true psychopath. He has read up on the disorder and is smart enough to have gamed the tests. This was the only way a poor kid like Andre could get a full ride to Adams. He and Chloe have an uneasy relationship. There is a lot of back and forth about trust. When the two join forces with Charles, the resulting bonds break, reorganize, break again, and again. All on the basis of who can trust whom. 

Trust is everything, because one of them might be the killer.

Who has been killed? So far, two students in the study. Definitely murdered. Were they killed because they were in the study or because the wheel of fate chose them at random and they coincidentally were both psychopaths?

Kurian is adept at producing precocious teenage voices, psychopathic teenage voices. Chloe’s voice is especially endearing because of its quirkiness and single-mindedness. Yes, this potential murderer is endearing.

I’m not sure what a sequel would look like, but the door remains open, even if a prison door or two were to be slammed shut.