Daniel Handler. The Basic Eight (1999) 329 pp.
The story of 19-year old Flannery Culp—precocious, pretentious, and in jail on a murder conviction. She is accused of leading a Satanic cult—composed of herself and seven friends (the “Basic Eight”) from an upper-middle-class San Francisco high school—in the deaths of a teacher and a fellow student. Believing that she and her friends have been misunderstood, she has typed up her journals to set the record straight.  Note: This is the first novel by the author of the popular children’s books, A Series of Unfortunate Events, that he writes under the pseudonym of Lemony Snicket.