I feel like this book misses each mark it sets out. As a scary story it doesn't really seem scare, just melodrama and poor communication created issues out of nothing. Never once was I scared.
As a mystery... well it's not a mystery. Figured out many plot points before they happened because the author flat out tells you who's a bad person and who's not. The only people who dont know are the people themselves.
And worst IMO is Chekov's gun. I mean that as literally as I can. It a shotgun above the fireplace. It goes off And if you think me telling you that it's Chekov's gun is a spoiler, it's not because the people in the book call it Checkov's gun. That exact term. It's not clever, it just highlights that the characters in this story are the only ones who are somehow blind enough to not see what's going on.
Listen, I know I'm a homebody. I know I'm not the kind of person that likes to mingle with strangers I just met, but I can if I have to. I can sympathize with an introverted character. But goddamn was it uncomfortable dealing with this protagonist who was such a pushover wallflower that I was getting secondhand embarrassment over a person who doesn't even exist. (Which I guess is a compliment to the author for being able to elicit such a strong reaction out of me as a reader, but I don't think that was the intent).
At it's core, this was a murder mystery where the murder in question didn't even occur until the halfway point of the book, which is fine; not every whodunit has to open with the scene of the body being discovered. And I'm not opposed to chopped-up timelines that are presented out-of-order. But I …
Listen, I know I'm a homebody. I know I'm not the kind of person that likes to mingle with strangers I just met, but I can if I have to. I can sympathize with an introverted character. But goddamn was it uncomfortable dealing with this protagonist who was such a pushover wallflower that I was getting secondhand embarrassment over a person who doesn't even exist. (Which I guess is a compliment to the author for being able to elicit such a strong reaction out of me as a reader, but I don't think that was the intent).
At it's core, this was a murder mystery where the murder in question didn't even occur until the halfway point of the book, which is fine; not every whodunit has to open with the scene of the body being discovered. And I'm not opposed to chopped-up timelines that are presented out-of-order. But I found the use of amnesia to explain why the events of this terrible, horrible, no good, very bad bachelorette party couldn't be told sequentially to be a bit of a cop-out, and reminded me why I don't like unreliable narrators. There was also the matter of this big deep dark secret in the protagonist's past that I think was built up a tad much because the big reveal fell flat for me.
Ultimately, it all just keeps coming back to Leonora, the protagonist. She was just flat-out unlikable and killed an otherwise interesting prompt. When you pitch a book that has an in-fiction murder mystery writer end up in a murder mystery involving her own friends, I was hoping for some savant-level leaps of logic that paid off, or at least some clever observations. Instead I got this timid girl who acts ten years younger than she is who literally has to be sat down and explained what happened by the killer!
I don't dip my toe into this genre much, but even I know there are better options out there.
Also, the entire plot hinges on being able to send misleading texts from someone else's phone, but how the fuck did Flo unlock Leonora's cell when she was out for a jog? You can't tell me someone as neurotic as Leonora doesn't have a security lock feature on her phone, which was absolutely a thing when this book came out.
Called it by page 200 of 308. But that's not necessarily because I'm super-clever. Ware does this thing where she telegraphs that a character is a bad person to the reader, but the protagonist is frustratingly too stuck in her own insecurities to realize it. There's a compelling sequence of events and even the framing device adds some intrigue to the first third of the book, but Ware leans on the levers too often and what started out as suspense ends up as melodrama.
