Hockey, prep school and a mystery drive Pittsburgh native’s new novel

Anna Bruno’s second novel, “Fine Young People” (Algonquin), is a whodunit: After one of their classmates dies by suicide, two senior girls at a Sewickley prep school work to unravel the mystery of an earlier, seemingly related death — that of another of the school’s student ice hockey stars two decades earlier.

But in addition to being a page-turner, “Fine Young People” is also a critique of the culture of money, ambition and, yes, even sports obsession that enfolds most everyone in the orbit of the fictional St. Ignatius high school.

‘Secular gods’

Bruno grew up in Upper St. Clair and got her own high school diploma from Shady Side Academy. She also grew up Catholic, and she said the social criticism in “Fine Young People” targets the way worldly idols have taken the place of spiritual values.

The nominally Catholic St. Ignatius, she said, “has come to worship secular gods like the endowment and the hockey team and Ivy League admissions.”

The book’s protagonist, Frankie Northrup, is a high achiever with a single mom who tackles the closed-case murder mystery as a class project with her best friend, Shivani. St. Ignatius hockey legend Woolf Whiting, it’s said, was bound for the NHL; his death, too, was ruled a suicide, but the girls don’t buy it, and their sleuthing touches on everything from schoolboy athletes on painkillers to family politics and shady business deals.

The book toggles between third-person accounts of past events and Frankie’s own soul-searching but witty present-day narration. The high school senior, specially tuned to differences in social class, characterizes her sort-of boyfriend thus: “Ingo squinted at me with the earnest cluelessness of a boy who’d never had to make his own sandwich.”

But it’s perhaps ice hockey, complete with hometown references to the Pittsburgh Penguins, that the story revolves around most. “Everyone in a way loses [themselves] in this sport, which they care so much about,” Bruno said. “The book is questioning, ‘Well, why do we care so much about it? Or why do we care so much about it that we’re willing to give up everything else for it?’”

‘A soulless place’

Bruno played soccer in high school (her brother was the hockey player), and her writing draws on her campus experiences. She set the novel in Sewickley rather than Fox Chapel — home to Shady Side — because it offers a business district in which characters can convene.

And like her young characters — one of whom is an 18-year-old who has apparently begun planning for retirement — Bruno was an ambitious kid. She graduated from Stanford University and worked in PR and marketing for tech and financial-services companies in Silicon Valley.

“So I was living in California for about 10 years and I thought that was what I was supposed to be doing, and I was supposed to be making money and being successful as sort of classically defined,” she said. She even earned an MBA from Cornell.

Not surprisingly, she enjoyed spending her 20s in San Francisco. But something, as they say, was missing. A lot, actually.

“I think Silicon Valley is a bit of a soulless place,” Bruno said. “That sounds harsh coming out of my mouth right now, but there is such a focus there on the tech industry and venture capital and just extreme wealth and a lot of the other stuff that makes a life, whether it’s the arts or other parts of the culture, … sort of get pushed to the side.”

“I realized that I wanted to be a writer,” she said. “That I was more interested in the spiritual — my inner life, I guess my ambitions were directed more towards that.”

Bruno has now spent 10 years in Iowa City, where she earned an MFA in Fiction from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. She lives with her husband and two sons and teaches at the University of Iowa’s Tippie College of Business and the Iowa Summer Writing Festival.

Her choice seems to be paying off. Like her debut novel, 2020’s “Ordinary Hazards,” “Fine Young People” is drawing strong reviews.

“Bruno uses the framework of a whodunit to drive at deeper questions of faith and family,” wrote Publisher’s Weekly. “Bruno pulls it off, thanks to her keen sense of what’s at stake for her teenage characters and Frankie’s indelible voice. It’s a winner.”