Emily Hunt was murdered the weekend of her college graduation at an affluent New England liberal arts college. At the center of the mystery are her closest college friends, tragic Mitch, power couple Alex and Cassie, and emotionally bankrupt Will. Emily's murder haunts all of them, naturally they know more than they're letting on, and they'll do anything to keep the past well and truly buried.
Then Will, poor dumb bunny Will, gets engaged. For like the fourth time, but who's counting? His fiancée Ruthie wants to get the friends together to celebrate their engagement and picks a remote house on an island in Maine. As a storm is blowing in. Convenient. Also joining this house of horrors is Sierra, Mitch's business partner - who also happens to be in love with him. They're not on the island long before random weirdness starts happening and the first body is discovered in the garage.
I'll be honest, it was the comp to And Then There Were None that made me pick up this book, and when that comp is dangled before me I just expect certain things. I expect to hate pretty much everybody (check) and I expect nearly everybody to die (yeah, not so much). I mean, half the fun of this type of story is that the characters you hate are the bodies that start dropping. And while I quite literally hated everybody in this story, not nearly enough of them ended up dead in the end. Sorry, not sorry. In fact, the first two dead bodies are tertiary characters we never meet alive on the page. This is a problem because Kane does such a good job of making me hate everybody that to have most of them not die is just, well, a bummer.
I realize how this sounds, but if you're a suspense/thriller fan this is IYKYK kind of thing.
Sierra is the innocent bystander character that we, as the reader, are supposed to rally around. The one who gets sucked into the madness only because she's an idiot who's in love with Mitch. And ultimately that's what annoys me about her. Everybody in this story, literally everybody, wants to protect "poor, tragic Mitch." Look, I get it - his childhood was jacked up. But he's such an unlikeable, almost passive aggressive in his sarcasm, character that I just wanted him to die. And no, I won't tell you if he does or not.
Besides the fact that the body count isn't nearly high enough, the suspense thread is a blunt instrument. With a plot of this nature I want Machiavelli. Sorry, just do. I want twists, turns, who can you trust? This is more like a cudgel upside the head.
All that being said, there is a very nice twist at the end that I did not see coming and it was really good. Unfortunately by then I just felt a little worn down by it all. Too many of these horrible people left alive, not enough deviousness on the part of our villain. It's not terrible, but it's not really what I wanted. And well, it's all about me.
Final Grade = C+
5 comments:
Bummmmer! I agree—if I'm reading something that's supposed to be like And Then There Were None I expect literally every single person in the group to be picked off one by one. Or at least the first person to die to be one of the central group.
Holly: Usually the problem I have with books compared to And Then There Were None is that you hate everybody so much that there's no one really to root for. Kane definitely addressed that here - Sierra could have been a character to root for (easily) but her being in love with Mitch just soured me on her.
Seriously, I wanted everybody to die and they didn't 😂. That good twist at the end - there needed to be more like that.
The author absolutely has to kill everyone for a publisher to publicise a book as "like And Then There Were None" otherwise a disservice is done to readers and the author, raising false expectations can poison an otherwise "good enough" book.
We are readers, it really is all about us (IOW, every book has its reader)
Jazzlet: In this case I feel like the comparison to I Know What You Did Last Summer was a bit more apt. The publisher and marketing team should have left well enough alone with that.
AL: I know, right?! Like why isn't it all about me all the time? 😂
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