For the past 10 years, a group of friends from Oxford meets over the holidays to welcome in the new year. This year, the vacation destination is a remote hunting lodge in the Scottish Highlands. The champagne flows as the friends drink and reminisce. But secrets are revealed and by the time the snow starts falling on New Year’s Day, one of the friends will end up dead.
I have mixed feelings about this book. This book is told in multiple narratives and multiple timelines. We get the points of view of two of the lodge employees who find the dead body. We also get the points of view from three of the friends in the days leading up to New Year’s Day.
It’s a psychological thriller and sort of a locked room mystery. The friends are stuck at a lodge in the middle of nowhere, cut off from everyone, while a snowstorm rages outside. And they must figure out who the killer is before they become the next victim.
But honestly, this group of friends? This group of friends is the worst! They are more like frenemies and I didn’t understand why any of them were even friends with one another. There were so many secrets and backstabbing. Hardly none of the characters in this book are likable. There was one couple that I thought may have been pleasant and that was only because they were new parents and they end up saying in their room a lot with the baby so we rarely saw them. I’m sure If they didn’t have their baby and hung out with the friends as much as everyone else, I would have found something to dislike about them.
The one thing that drove me crazy about this book was the reveal of the murder victim. The author went through such pains to keep the identity of the victim a secret that we don’t even find out if it is a man or a woman until about three-fourths of the way into the book. And then we don’t even find out who the victim is until the last few chapters. I can’t decide if this is “great storytelling” or a gimmick by the author to keep people reading. It sure kept me reading if only because I wanted to find out which horrible friend was dead.
Additionally, the lodge employees kept using the word “guest” so that you didn’t know who the victim was or if they were male or female. It got to the point where every time they talked about the “murdered guest”, I just wanted to yell out to tell us who it is!
I liked this book however, the fact that it took so long to find out who died, combined with an epilogue that I felt brought up more questions and plot holes, made me not love it.
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