The Savage Kind

"Philippa Watson, a good-natured yet troubled seventeen-year-old, has just moved to Washington, DC. She's lonely until she meets Judy Peabody ... The girls become unlikely friends ... drawing the notice of Christine Martins, their dazzling English teacher ... When Philippa returns a novel Miss Martins has lent her, she interrupts a man grappling with her in the shadows ... Days later, her teacher returns to school altered: a dark shell of herself. On the heels of her teacher's transformation, a classmate is found dead in the Anacostia River, murdered, the body stripped and defiled with a mysterious inscription"--