This isolated mystery follows Nora as she's invited to a bachelorette party of a friend she hasn't spoken to in years. Nora, usually a reclusive crime writer who doesn't like to leave her apartment, reluctantly agrees and finds herself in an isolated house deep in the English countryside. Soon, a series of strange events start to unnerve Nora and as interpersonal tensions rise and bubble over - she finds herself in a hospital bed injured but alive. However, she isn't wondering "what happened" but rather "what did I do". As Nora tries to piece together her memory of the past weekend, Nora must reach into her long buried past to figure out the truth of what happened.
TW/CW: alcohol use, drug use, abortion, suicide
This was Ware's debut thriller and I think it had some good bones, but I didn't love the overall execution. I know she's a very popular author and I have most of her other books on my TBR and I'm looking forward to getting to them. I read this during jury duty and it was an entertaining way to spend a few hours that day.
These isolated, closed-circle mysteries are one of my favorite types of mysteries and I did like the time we spent in the house with the characters. However, the dual timeline aspect took away some of the tension for me because I do prefer these to be completely isolated from basically start to finish. The fact that Nora is in the hospital and thinking back over the past few days really took me out of the immediacy of the situation in the house. In the sections where we are in the house with the characters, Ware does a really good job creating interpersonal tension and the sort of awkwardness that comes with groups of somewhat strangers coming together. I also thought Ware did a great job of giving the reader the lay of the land (literally) through various situations that had the characters exploring or going out to different areas of the house. I do wish we had more of that creeping dread built up before the climactic scenes start, but since the characters were only at the house for a long weekend, I know Ware could only fit in so many details.
I didn't love the use of dual timeline in this and after letting the story sit in my brain for a bit, I think this is because I felt it gave too much away. I can see that Ware was trying to use this as a way of building tension and letting the reader know a big event was going to happen. I didn't guess what, exactly, was going to happen, but I felt my guesses being steered in certain directions based on the information we find out in the 'present' timeline. This might just be because it was Ware's debut, but it sort of felt like the dual timeline was a bit of a crutch to insert some artificial tension or intrigue into the story. Almost like Ware felt that the story wouldn't be as interesting as a single timeline and instead of working on the plotting or mystery reveals, this was sort of a 'quick fix' for that problem. I did enjoy that the past timeline caught up with the present at about 75% mark and then we were able to finish up the book in one linear direction which I think was a strong decision for the last act.
The characters and their relationships were really interesting and I loved being a fly on the wall for this celebration. I loved the mix of personalities that felt natural for each character and, thus, naturally created conflict. For example, we had a free-spirit type of person who just wanted to have fun and then a type-A personality who wanted everything to be done exactly how they'd planned it. I did find Nora the blandest character in the bunch, which was a bit disappointing since we were following her for the story. However, this did make her an easy way for the reader to sort of insert themselves into the story. We know from the beginning that Nora used to be friends with the bride-to-be but they have since grown apart. We see Nora pretty consistently judging or making comments about the relationships she's seeing during this weekend and I think it would have been more interesting to see some flashbacks of the friend group dynamic in the past. I've seen a number of reviews that really disliked Nora and I do think she's not meant to be a very likeable narrator. I personally really enjoy unlikable narrators, but I want them to be unlikable in interesting ways which I didn't find the case with Nora.
As far as the mystery plot and the reveals, I really didn't like the way they were presented. I thought the points worked okay on paper, but there was something about the way the reveals were executed that didn't work. It was a little hard to put my finger on why exactly they didn't work and I think it came down to Nora's character and a bit of the lack of backstory/history we get. We find out certain information about Nora a little too late in the book and then it felt like we didn't get enough time to see how that information impacted her/the story. Also, it seemed like most of the reveals were for the reader only and it was information that the characters already knew which also made it feel a less impactful. I think this mystery had all the potential to be a really twisty and fun ride but ended up taking the more simple route and thus was a pretty standard read.
Overall, this had some elements I really enjoyed, but I didn't quite like the way the pieces came together in the end. This was a real solid middle of the road mystery and maybe my perspective is a bit skewed because I gave my copy to my mom and she really enjoyed it (she isn't much of a mystery reader).
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