What really happened on that study abroad trip? This Stays Between Us is a thriller with secrets, nostalgia, and a killer twist

There’s something about group travel—especially when you’re young and far from home—that heightens everything. The connections are fast, the drama is intense, and the stakes, whether you realize it or not, can be life changing. For me, it was a study abroad trip to Portugal, Spain, and Gibraltar at seventeen: whirlwind friendships, unrequited love, long hours on a tour bus, and at least one fellow traveler who drank too much and clearly needed help. We even had a retired singer who we realized – after my cousin recognized her from an old vinyl album of our grandma’s – had killed her husband decades before. And the “professor” who organized the trip? A con artist who scammed us out of a promised excursion to Morocco. Thankfully, no one ended up dead on that trip, but reading Sara Ochs’ This Stays Between Us brought a lot of that strange, charged energy back.

This sharply constructed thriller centers on two timelines: the “then,” when a group of students embarks on a month-long study abroad adventure in Australia, and the “now,” when the discovery of a long-missing student’s remains forces the group back together. From the beginning, there’s a sense that the friendships formed on the trip—particularly between best friends Claire and Phoebe—weren’t as solid as they appeared. And as we learn more about what happened on the trip, the facade begins to crack.

At the heart of the novel is Claire, who seems determined to uncover the truth of Phoebe’s death. But readers quickly learn that she’s not the impartial narrator she wants to appear. Because Claire knows exactly what happened to her best friend—she’s the one who killed her.

The strength of This Stays Between Us lies in its layered, psychological realism. These aren’t cookie-cutter thriller characters. They’re people who made stupid choices at the age of twenty and have been living in the long shadow of those choices ever since. There’s plenty of suspense here, but the real tension builds from the slow unraveling of relationships that were always more complicated than they seemed.

Anyone who’s ever been on an extended group trip will recognize the dynamics. You spend a few intense weeks together, convinced you’ve found your best friends—or your soulmate. You bond over shared adventures, inside jokes, emotional breakdowns, and too many late nights. But most of those connections fade the minute you get back home. And if you do reconnect later, it’s usually with a jarring realization: without the context of the trip, you don’t actually like these people that much.

Claire’s return to Australia a decade later is full of that uncomfortable disillusionment. She still holds onto the belief that she met her one true love on that trip, even though he broke her heart at the time and has barely spoken to her since. Her decisions in the present—including rekindling something with another former tripmate—seem less about love and more about trying to keep a grip on the fantasy of who she was before. Before Phoebe died. Before Claire became someone else entirely.

This is the real genius of Ochs’s novel: it’s not just a twisty, bingeable thriller (though it absolutely is that). It’s also a story about identity and guilt, about how our most intense experiences can warp our memories and trap us in a version of ourselves we can’t escape. It asks whether any relationship that comes out of that kind of trauma can ever be healthy—and whether we really want the truth, or just something that feels close enough.

Fans of Lucy Foley, The It Girl, or The Secret History will find a lot to love here. But readers who’ve ever studied abroad or taken a group trip in their youth may find this novel especially haunting. Because while murder makes the headlines, the real damage is often done in the moments we pretend don’t count—when we think we’re just young, just having fun, just trying to find ourselves.

Have you ever formed intense friendships while traveling—or reconnected later only to realize they weren’t what you thought? Share your travel stories, study abroad drama, or thoughts on this novel in the comments below. I’d love to hear from you!

Thank you to Sourcebooks Landmark, Sara Ochs, and NetGalley for a digital ARC of this novel in exchange for my honest review.

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