Scan­ning through stream­ing TV offer­ings, brows­ing top pod­casts, read­ing tabloid head­lines, one sees an end­less parade of crime sto­ries, often focused on the griz­zly deaths of young women. While it might seem that the Amer­i­can fas­ci­na­tion with mur­dered women has reached a fever pitch, it is far from a new phe­nom­e­non. In fact, a cul­tur­al his­to­ry of Amer­i­ca could be told through the mur­der sto­ries that defined var­i­ous nation­al epochs. The Black Dahlia mur­der cap­ti­vat­ed the pop­u­lace dur­ing the post­war for­ties, the Man­son mur­ders dur­ing the six­ties, and the Prep­py Mur­der dur­ing the eight­ies. Cyn­thia Weiner’s unset­tling new nov­el is a fic­tion­al­ized depic­tion of this lat­ter mur­der, the death of a young woman stran­gled by a prep school grad­u­ate in Cen­tral Park. A Gor­geous Excite­ment is sev­er­al things at once — a lurid crime dra­ma, a com­ing-of-age sto­ry, and a tex­tured ren­der­ing of the blue-blood­ed, cocaine-coat­ed Upper East Side of the Rea­gan years.

Nina Jacobs is both an insid­er and an out­sider to this cul­ture. Though a grad­u­ate of a tony all-girls school, her Jew­ish­ness and her mother’s men­tal ill­ness set her apart. It’s the sum­mer after her senior year, and she’s des­per­ate for two things: first, to stay away from her moth­er’s crush­ing depres­sion; and sec­ond, to find a man to whom she can lose her vir­gin­i­ty before she goes to Van­der­bilt in the fall. Hang­ing out at Flanagan’s, an Irish dive where the teen elite min­gle every Fri­day, keeps her out of the house and near Gard­ner Reed, a hand­some prep school bad boy all the girls are after. Nina is ini­tial­ly shy around Gard­ner, in awe of his sta­tus and sto­ried antics. Then she meets Stephanie, a tough-talk­ing girl from Long Island who intro­duces her to sex shops and coke, and whose brash con­fi­dence inspires her to get clos­er to Gard­ner no mat­ter whom she angers in the process.

Over the course of the sum­mer, Nina and Stephanie’s drug use becomes more fre­quent. The fran­tic cocaine highs are vis­cer­al­ly depict­ed by Wein­er, who shows the girls careen­ing around the city at all hours of the night. Nina’s moth­er takes a new med­ica­tion which swings her from depres­sion to a mania, and the two women’s fever­ish psy­ches begin to mir­ror each oth­er. Though buoyed by Weiner’s snap­py dia­logue and vivid descrip­tion, this is a dark book. Nina’s school friends are harsh; her moth­er, when in the throes of men­tal ill­ness, is aston­ish­ing­ly cru­el. The Man­hat­tan it depicts is racist and teem­ing with vio­lent creeps. Even Nina’s door­man is handsy and leer­ing. And then of course there’s Gard­ner, who becomes increas­ing­ly men­ac­ing and errat­ic as time passes. 

Though one will won­der which char­ac­ter becomes the inevitable mur­der vic­tim, the who­dunit aspect of the book is not its most com­pelling. What stays with the read­er after fin­ish­ing A Gor­geous Excite­ment is Weiner’s unsen­ti­men­tal ren­der­ing of this moment in New York his­to­ry, and how much, as well as how lit­tle, has changed.