The cast of 7 friends are:
Emily, the sister who never lets her hearing loss hold her back.
Lauren, the sister who always feels a step behind.
Morna, who doesn’t get on with Lauren.
Ben, whose feelings for Emily border on obsession.
Dan, the quiet newcomer to the group.
Kai, who isn’t just on the hike to enjoy the wildlife.
And Alec, the one who knows all their secrets.
Overall, this book really didn't work for me. I had such a hard time getting through it and I think it was at least 100 pages too long. There wasn't anything glaringly bad with it, but the pieces were all just okay and they came together in such a way where the whole was less than the parts. However, based on the reviews that have already been posted, I am in the minority on this one (currently has a 3.68 on Goodreads with 148 reviews).
I really enjoyed the friend group dynamic and found it a bit of a refreshing take on the typical dynamic for isolated thrillers. This group is a birdwatching group and most of them don't hang out together outside of the group outings. I find that with most isolated thrillers, the group involved is often more closely tied than the group in this book was. Usually, groups that are closely tied mean that they have more history and, thus, more room for interpersonal conflict. In this case, the fact that these people are basically strangers to each other actually plays into the thriller element because they don't know enough about the others to be confident of who is the murderer and who isn't. That being said, I was very surprised at how intertwined the group actually is once we get into the meat of the story and secrets start being revealed. I did like how Emily was the most outsider of the group since she was the newest member and really only there to try and bond with Lauren. Emily was by far my favorite character and I loved how she gave us a bit of the 'outsider perspective' on the other members of the group.
I always prefer my isolated thrillers to be multi-POV so I was glad that we got to read from all 7 POV in this story. However, I did find a lot of the characters to be very annoying and tedious to read from (Emily being the one exception). I think my main issue stemmed from the author trying to build tension but it ended up being way overdone for me. At the very beginning of the book, we know Alec said something during a previous group outing that really upset everyone but each POV we got would only allude to 'that thing Alec said that upset everyone' and it wasn't until 10% in that we actually find out what he said. I thought that would be it and we would move on, however, that same tactic was then used through the majority of the book where each of the characters has some sort of big, life-altering secret that they keep bringing up in their POV but they also don't actually explain what those secrets are. And most of the time, it is the POV character wondering to themself "maybe ABC Character found out about my secret", or sometimes thinking to themselves "if my secret gets out, I'm going to jail". But none of them actually say what their secret is. And I understand this is done to build tension in the story and as a sort of red herring because if all of them have secrets they don't want revealed then any one of them could be the killer. However, it was done so often and it felt so heavy handed that I just wanted to crawl into the book and punch the characters. I think the line between intriguing and annoying is going to be different for different readers and, for me, this significantly crossed the line into annoying territory.
I thought the setting was unique and it was an interesting twist on the typical isolation thriller location. I'm a bit torn on how 'isolated' I like my isolation thrillers to be because, in theory, the characters weren't truly isolated but the actions and decisions by the characters is what ends up cutting them off for further assistance. Because of this, there were a few times where the character choices fell into the horror movie trope of "just get out of the house, why are you going to investigate the noise???" where I understand why we needed to have something waylay these characters a bit, but I found some of those situations to be a little too convenient. I was reading an ebook ARC so this might change for the final version, but I would have loved a map in the front of this book. I think it would have helped so much to understand the scale of this nature preserve and just how twisty the trails were. There were a number of times where the group had to choose between two paths - one more established but longer and a more rough short cut and I think being able to see those paths on a map would have helped me better understand the stakes in those decisions. Also, we were given a good number of distances but I didn't have a good sense of how time was passing during the chapters. Most of the time, it seemed like the chapters were in direct chronological order and we were just switching POVs but there were a few times where we would change POV and it seemed like that new chapter was taking place at the same time as the chapter we had just read. I think adding something like timestamps at the beginning of each chapter would have helped me really get a feel for the pacing of the events taking place better.
The pacing was really hit and miss for me. I think of isolation thrillers as being very high tension but low action and this book was sort of the opposite. There was a lot of running and hiding and choosing which path to take and more hiding but I never really felt like the characters were in danger. When the one person in the group is killed, the other characters seem really wishy-washy on if someone else in the group killed that character or if there was someone else in the wildlife preserve. At different times, different characters felt like they would swing wildly from one option to the other but I never felt like the narrative, as a whole, pointed the reader in any one directly. In my experience, isolated thrillers are either type 1: 'characters think threat is outside, but is actually inside' or type 2: 'characters think threat is inside, but is actually outside'. I think in this case, the book didn't settle into one of these two main, generally accepted, branches. And, of course, Pattison didn't need to choose one of those two branches but I feel like the way she chose to plot her story was, again, the less impactful option.
The ending twist, right at the last page of the book, lowered my rating by a full star. It wasn't objectively bad, but I felt it lessened the impact of the rest of the book and made the story feel unfinished. It was one of those reveals that, sure, did turn everything we thought we knew completely around. However, in doing so, it re-opened parts of the plot that the book had told the reader were done. The ending feels like sequel bait a bit and I'm generally not a fan of that sort of ending. Also, when I look back at the story, I don't see any breadcrumbs or hints toward this ending twist. Which was especially annoying considering we rotated through everyone's POV so it, again, felt a little cheep because the author specifically left those clues out of the book. The twist is big enough that it would be something the character in question would be thinking about probably a lot in the given situation. However, we never see any of those thoughts when we are in their POV. If anything, the characterization is almost the opposite of what it would be given everything that character knows is going on.
Overall, this story just didn't come together for me. I liked some of the individual aspects, but the story as a whole was not entertaining or effective. I was often annoyed while reading this and really wished the story had taken a different angle with some of the plot lines.
Thanks to NetGalley and Avon Books for the ARC
Expected publication date is December 9, 2021
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