The Boundaries We Cross by Brad Parks

 

This is a competently-written thriller that hits harder than it probably should, given that it kinda seems as though it's built around the sort of coyly lying narrator that's become popular, lately. That impression is at least mostly wrong: The narrator is deeply unreliable, but he's not at all coy--there are other dynamics at work, here. The novel also has the stuff going on with the thirties-aged male instructor maybe/maybe-not boinking one of his attractive teenaged students, and there are of course unfoldings around and about that, that would probably come off badly in a less-well-written thriller novel. The POV narrator isn't especially likeable at first, but he does get better, some of the unfoldings do a real beat-down on his ego and/or self-image. The other characters do not all come off super-interesting or nice, but a lot of that might be the various accruals of privilege so many of them have. I kept almost putting this down for the first half or so of it, but the back half made that mostly worth the going.