Burning Girl

Drew Burke, the main character in Neihart's lean, intense and provocatively cool second novel (after Hey, Joe), is a 20-year-old Johns Hopkins scholarship student who hangs out with rich, spoiled and beautiful schoolmates to whom he feels inferior. The story takes place during Memorial Day weekend at the house of his best friend, Bahar Richards, and her older brother Jake, who is Drew's new crush. Unbeknownst to the innocent Drew, who attempts to emulate his fast-lane friends by popping pills and engaging in risky sex, the siblings are planning to tell him about their involvement in the rape and murder of Bahar's erstwhile best friend, Allison Myers. As in his previous novel, Neihart creates an implausible and lurid plot device in order to breed a sick intimacy among the characters (""Me and Bahar like bleed into each other,"" Drew explains to another friend). The cheap thrills and violence that result are impossible to mistake for depth or dramatic meaning. The breezy prose is jarringly slang-filled and the characters described in relentless designer-logo detail. The suspense Neihart builds around the crime--are Jake and Bahar guilty? is one sibling covering for the other?--is palpable, but even this wears thin, as character after character keeps storming from rooms before the truth can be revealed. By the time Drew learns what really happened the night Allison was killed (when Jake calls into Larry King Live during his famous pop psychologist mother's appearance and spills his guts on television), the reader may be too exasperated to care. Author tour. (Apr.)