Another day, another thriller...
⭐️⭐️⭐️
The Blurb:
Beware of friends with secrets…
Imagine your closest friend utterly betraying you. Years later, when she seeks forgiveness, you invite her to your engagement party as a gesture of reconciliation. But seething hostilities rise to the surface, ruining everyone’s evening. After an awful night, your friend’s battered, lifeless body is found at the bottom of a rocky cliff.
Newly engaged Marissa Parlette is living this nightmare. She should be celebrating her upcoming wedding, but she can’t shake the image of her friend lying dead on the beach. Did she fall? Was she pushed? Or did she take a purposeful step into darkness? Desperate for answers, Marissa digs deep into the events of the party. But what she remembers happening after nightfall now carries sinister implications: the ugly sniping, the clandestine meetings, the drunken flirtations. The more she investigates, the more she questions everything she thought she knew about her friends, the man she once trusted, and even herself.
The Review
As thrillers go, this was pretty decent. Problem is, I read so darn many of them that they have to be better than 'pretty decent' to get a rave review from me.
Lauren's dead. We don't know who would have killed her (or even if she was killed) and why. And neither does Marissa. And this fact start to drives her crazy, trying to find out what happened and if she can trust the people around her. One of the strengths of this book is that it gets you questioning every character's integrity and whether anyone is telling the truth. There's a lot of red herrings so you'd be forgiven for absolutely not guessing who the culprit is (which, I admit, I did not)
So a great, if familiar, 'who dunnit?' plot. The thing that didn't work for me was the interactions between the characters. Some of the conversations just didn't flow, or even make a huge amount of sense sometimes which for me took away some of the realism.
The other frustration for me, is that Banner really tees up a reason for you to hate the murdered woman. I kinda like this in a thriller - when you're not lead to sympathise with the victim. However, we only get some of this back story and I felt I needed more explanation. (Why would a guy who has just proposed to you...suddenly jump into bed with someone else, did Lauren manipulate him, just what happened there?!)
However if you're looking for a well paced thriller with a decent twist, that you'll blast through pretty quickly, then this is a good pick me up.
Thanks to the Publisher and Netgalley for this preview copy in return for an honest review.
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