This isolation thriller follows a group of four friends as they reconnect over a long birthday weekend. Grace, Alice, Hannah, and Felicity were best friends until one night, two years ago. After the events of that evening, the friend group fractured and they haven't been in much contact since - until they all receive invitations for Felicity's birthday party at a safari lodge in Botswana. Flying from London to Botswana for a long weekend may seem excessive, but the friends are eager to catch up and maybe even mend their friendship. Everything looks great upon their arrival until they start to realize there's no sign of a birthday party, barely any phone signal, and no other guests or staff. They're on their own and that is when things really start to go wrong.
TW/CW: sexual assault, sexual assault by a family member, miscarriage, forced sterilization, stalking, domestic violence
The first 50% of this book was fantastic. The characters were intriguing, the setting was atmospheric, there was a perfect slow trickle of information as well as growing sense of unease. Then Part 2 opened and all of that building and layering and work that Morgan did in the first half was, for me, basically instantly shredded. I read an ARC, so there is a possibility that things could change for the final version, but based on what I read the first 1/2 was shaping up to be a 5 star read and then the second 1/2 felt like it was still actively being drafted and was a few versions behind the beginning.
My favorite aspect (and the main reason I requested to read an ARC of this) was the messy friend group. Messy friend group + isolation thriller = (almost always) a 4 or 5 star read. It is trope candy for me and I think it is because I do prefer character-focused thrillers. We know that there was some even 2 years prior that caused the friend group to basically dissolve but the reader doesn't know exactly what happened. We do get multi-POV from mainly 3 of the friends - Grace, Alice, and Hannah and each of them have slightly different thoughts about what happened that night. I always like getting multi-POV in these types of books and I think each of the friends were interesting in their own way so I didn't have a preferred character to be following. Morgan did a fantastic job of really giving each of them their own voice so it was easy to tell them apart. I did find it strange that Grace's chapters were told in 1st person while Alice and Hannah's were told in 3rd person and each time we would switch from one to the other it took my brain a page or two before I got back in the groove. I really enjoyed how we got to see the cracks in this friend group even when they are all trying to focus on being happy to be back together but little side comments really needled at their relationship. I really wish we got more of this slow breakdown of the friend group throughout the book instead of the structure that we ended up with (that I'll complain about further below).
The pacing almost killed this read for me. The first 50% of the story was great. We got this slow build up of excitement as these characters were getting ready to leave their normal lives to go on this vacation/birthday party. Then as tensions rise when they realize this vacation isn't exactly as advertised and I was 100% on board. We get more and more hints at what happened on the disastrous night 2 years prior but I felt like I was gathering each new scrap of information and trying to put together the answer before the book could give it to me (which I love!). Bodies start dropping and I'm ready for this book to really kick it up a notch when it grinds to a sudden stop and we flash back to 2 years prior and see the events of the evening play out. Now, suddenly, we're removed from this high-tension setting and situation that we were getting really deep into and we're starting this new part of the book in a pretty mundane place. We do, eventually, get some good tension in this flashback portion, but it takes a long time to build it back up. And, more annoyingly, I felt there were a good many details that didn't really have any impact on the plot. Sure, it was more background info on the characters and their dynamics, but that new information didn't really expand on the characterization or their actions. In this section of the book, we do find out a pretty big piece of information early on but we have to sit through pages of what feels like pretty mundane conversations before that big reveal comes into play. So just when I think the pacing is going to pick up and have some shit hit the fan in the story, it gets dragged out and by the time we actually see the impact play out on page, it doesn't have the same emotional impact. We do, eventually, get back to the present day plot in the lodge but by that point, I had lost my emotional connection to that story line so I didn't really care how things got wrapped up. I think this was a case where if we really wanted to see the whole night in flashback format, having alternating chapters of the different timelines I think would have been much more effective.
Almost all of the CWs I listed above come in in the last 1/3-ish of the book so it ended up feeling like a huge info dump of all these traumatic experiences. And, of course, traumatic things don't always need some sort of big meaning or outcome to them - sometimes shitty things happen. However, the way in which these reveals were framed made me feel like I should have been more affected by them than I actually was. I don't think we got to see enough of the characters to make some of these reveals really hit the emotional point it felt like Morgan was going for. For example, the forced sterilization reveal. When we get this information, it was shocking and surprising, but then the plot moves on in basically the same way it would have even if the character was just infertile through a natural condition instead of a forced medical procedure. So, since the traumatic and shocking element didn't seem to make much of an impact to the character and plot overall, it felt unnecessary. This happened a number of times where we didn't see enough of this character's life to really make these reveals mean anything in terms of the current plot. Also, there weren't any breadcrumbs in the early part of the book that I could point to and say "ah, character X does Y because of A trauma". If these reveals were maybe done earlier as sort of a red herring situation where we think maybe a certain reveal will end up being the reason people are dead, then I could see them working much more effectively. However, since they come pretty close together in the last 1/3ish of the book, I was expecting them to have much more weight to the plot instead of them being more like sprinkles of extra background information for the reader.
I really enjoyed the setting and thought it was a nice way to refresh the typical isolation thriller locales of a snowed in cabin or creepy family manor. The descriptions we got were borderline over-done but I enjoyed them because Morgan was really able to imbue a particular atmosphere with her descriptions. That being said, I wish more was done with the setting. At the end of the day, from a plot perspective, this plot could have happened in pretty much any isolated location. It could have been a birthday party on a private island or in a secluded mountain cabin. The main tension the setting provided was that the characters were far away from their relatives and the cellphone service was spotty. Again, no points that make the setting stand out. I'll admit, I was hoping someone would get eaten by a lion. I was expecting the setting to play a much bigger role in the mystery of the deaths - was character A pushed or did they accidentally fall in the crocodile infested river, as an example. Also, while I could picture the lodge pretty well as far as the decorations and scale, I really could have used a map because what I was picturing wouldn't have exactly allowed some of the plot points to happen. A non-spoiler example would be that when the friends arrive to the lodge that first night, they find a table decked out with food but they haven't seen any staff members or anyone else around who could have laid out such a feast. What I was picturing was a large lodge, where there were only a handful of large rooms but in order for that type of situation to occur, I would think the lodge would have to be either much larger or have many more rooms than I was picturing. This sort of mis-match in my brain made it so I wasn't quite able to latch on to the proper level of creep-factor that I think Morgan was going for.
Overall, I think this book had a lot going for it but it really fell apart for me. I loved the first half and would almost recommend people to read up to the beginning of Part 2 and then stop and just let your imagination fill in the rest.
Thanks to NetGalley and William Morrow for the ARC
Expected publication date is April 26, 2022
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