The Score

Every campus series needs its farce, and The Score is Off-Campus playing its comedy card face up. Book three hands the narration to Dean Di Laurentis — trust fund, great hair, excellent skincare, a self-regard so cheerful it loops back around to charming — and to Allie Hayes, theatre major, newly and theatrically single, and firmly convinced that Dean is a walking cautionary tale. She is right. That is what makes it fun. The desk rates this the series' funniest volume and, in its sneaky final third, one of its most affecting, a combination Kennedy manages by letting the farce run at full speed before quietly asking what the performance is for.

It begins as the genre's oldest accident — a breakup, a best friend's empty apartment, a snowstorm, and a night both parties agree to classify as an isolated incident. The classification fails. What follows is a secret arrangement conducted around the series' watchful ensemble, and Kennedy mines the concealment for sustained comedy — Allie's theatrical training deployed for cover stories, Dean's group-chat crisis management, an escalating series of near-misses staged with sitcom timing. Underneath, the book runs its real experiment: Dean's charm as avoidance, a man who has arranged his life so nothing has ever been asked of him, meeting a woman who asks. Allie's refusal to be flattered into anything is the book's motor, and her theatre-kid pragmatism (feelings are material, rehearse accordingly) makes her one of Kennedy's sharpest narrators.

Then the final act arrives with a genuine loss the desk will not describe, and the comedy proves load-bearing after all: the book has been teaching Dean, and the reader, what showing up looks like, and it collects the lesson at the worst possible moment. Readers consistently report being ambushed. The desk was ambushed twice, the second time on reread and with full knowledge of the schedule, which we submit as a working definition of craft.

Honest notices: the secret-relationship contrivances require goodwill; the grief beat lands late and hard, and content guidance is worth a glance. Heat is the series' most frequent and least serious, until it is serious.

Who is this for? Readers who want their humour with a hidden invoice, theatre kids and those who love them, and series followers who suspected the shallow one had depths. He does. He would like it noted they are well-decorated depths. The desk adds one logistical kindness. Keep the fourth book close, because the ensemble's arc pays its final instalment there, and readers who finish this volume tend to reach for it before the tea has cooled.