THE PARTY ROOM #1: GET IT STARTED

Created by a pseudonymous author, the first installment of the Party Room trilogy may appeal to the rare reader who believes that the Gossip Girl series could be improved if only the characters were more generic and a couple of nasty, violent murders were added into the mix. As the novel opens, the coolest kids from New York City's exclusive Woodley School ("a group that defined what it meant to be hot and young and rich at the center of the world in the twenty-first century") are spending a typical Friday night getting wasted at the Party Room, the Upper East Side bar they consider their private clubhouse. Super hottie Samantha Byrne has a knockdown fight with her ex-boyfriend Brandon and then leaves with a "dangerous looking" red-haired stranger. When Samantha is found dead in Central Park (icky shades of Jennifer Levin's real-life 1986 murder), stabbed over 70 times, wrists bound with a rival prep school's tie, her best friend, Kirsten, starts doing some sleuthing, most of which takes the form of an extended bar crawl. Kirsten sparks a fledgling romance with sweet seeming Kyle who (in the whipsaw plotting that characterizes the novel) turns out to be Paul Stone, the young man who, a few years previously, was convicted of a murder similar to Samantha's. The book's pseudo-sophisticated trappings (designer name-dropping, swanky locales) are awkwardly layered over its tricked-up cliffhangers. Ages 16-up. (Feb.)