After a high school party, a terrible car crash tragically killed local good girl Phoebe Dean. The ambulance came 27 minutes too late to safe her. But was Phoebe as much of an angel as everyone is saying? Why didn't her brother Grant call the authorities sooner? Had he drunk too much? And what about Crazy Becca who sat in the back seat of the car, what did she have to do with it? June cares more about the disappearance of her brother Wyatt. How much of a coincidence is it that he ran away the same night of the accident? Did he have something to do with it? All answers will come at the 10 year memorial of Phoebe Dean's death... 

I really liked this story! The plot was very good and even though I read a lot of thrillers, the twist at the end still surprised me. I do think it shows that this is a debut.

June seeing Wyatt for the first time in 10 years would have been more suspenseful and would have impacted the readers more if we hadn't already read a chapter from his point of view.

I also thought there were too many POV's, which made it a bit confusing sometimes. Still, the writing style in Twenty-Seven Minutes is beautiful, there were some great plot twists and cliffhangers, and you could figure out what had really happened if you were able to connect all the dots correctly. Definitely recommend! 3.75 stars

Thanks to NetGalley, Ashley Tate and Ashley's team for providing me with an ARC!

This was a rollercoaster of emotions that flipped between the last and present as we look at happened to Phoebe and the accident at the bridge and the events leading up to it. There grieving, guilt,  blackmailing and symbolism and a cast of unreliable characters that you didn’t know really why truly happened until the end. Each of the characters were wrapped into their own cloud of guilt and grief, but also tangled so intricately into one another’s.

A compelling read I devoured in two or three days, this is a smalltown-set story where the occurrences of ten years previously still resonate and shape the characters' lives. Phoebe Dean died in a car accident after her brother crashed on a bridge returning from a party. In the back was Becca, who Grant Dean had been sleeping with (along with many others - as a football star and good looking guy he had his pick.) Since they were children he and Phoebe had made a pact to leave West Wibley together for college, him on a football scholarship, she on an academic one. Unfortunately he's also made a similar promise for a fresh start with Becca, a local girl who has a tendency towards obsessive behaviour when it comes to men she's slept with.
The title comes from the fact that it took Grant Dean 27 minutes to call for help from the estimated time of the accident - why? Becca has little memory of the accident but Grant helps her put the pieces together. She still wants them to be together but he insists they wait, claiming it won't look good after his sister's death. A decade on, she's still waiting. 
Another family waiting for resolution is June and her mother. That same night her brother Wyatt, another sports star, disappears, never to be seen again. Little is made of his disappearance - unlike the sainted Phoebe, he'd been in trouble with the police, including for drugs, and the general feeling was that his drug debts had caught up with him, or he'd left town before they did. A year later his father departs too, and June is left with her mother, who finds solace in a bottle and dies early in the book from liver cancer. Only June and one other person turn up at the funeral, which shows how the close-knit caring community is a fallacy that people only pay lip service to.
Phoebe had been coming concerned about Grant losing focus on his football, and nagging him about her suspicions he was involved in steroids and recreational drugs with Wyatt. She despised him seeing other girls as she felt that was another distraction. There had been no funeral for Phoebe when she died, her mother seemingly too heartbroken (she always favoured Phoebe over Grant, who resembled his late father who'd left her with a two year old and a baby to bring up alone.) But ten years on, she decides the time is right to hold a memorial - which is when we find out what exactly happened in the run-up to the party the night of the crash, and why it took Grant twenty seven minutes to call for help - a decision which cost his sister her life, and set in motion a series of events which will be fully revealed the night of the memorial...
The male characters in the book are pretty repugnant, whereas the females are regarded as one dimensional by the townsfolk - "Crazy" Becca, invisible June, sainted Phoebe...When Wyatt makes a shock reappearance, and Becca's memory snaps out of her self medicating fogginess, the stage is set for a reveal that ensures no one will quite see the events of a decade ago in the same light. 
I found the author had a real talent for descriptive writing, and although there could have been more fleshing out of the town and it's other inhabitants, there's enough here to please fans of other small town tales (Megan Miranda, a favourite of mine, springs to mind, as does Laura McHugh, another real talent) and thrillers, particularly those of the psychological variety. I'll certainly be on the lookout for the author's next book. Definitely worth a read if these are your taste in books. 

When I hear a book is "dark", I think blackness. This is a different kind of dark though. It's the loss of light, the grey, the claustrophobic feeling before a storm.

I read this through Pigeonhole (go look it up, it's like an online book club discussion), and I know a lot of people found it too slow, the characters too unlikeable, and there just not being "enough" action.

I disagree.

There's a cast of very flawed characters in a small town where everyone knows everyone, but no-one actually knows anyone.  After a teenager died ten years ago, it became well known how she lit up a room, and had birds dress her in the mornings.  Tragedy can do that to memories.

It's a book about secrets, and lies, and how we let the past influence our present and future.

It put me in mind of Tall Bones by Anna Bailey.

It's not gonna make you feel warm and fuzzy, but it might just make you feel.

This book was super slow to me. I appreciate a slow burn, but this was too slow. I also felt it was repetitive. These characters weren't likeable and still seemed extremely immature, even in adulthood. There were also a lot of characters to keep up with and there were points where I was confused.

There is a lot of suspense building, but the ending came in fast as a train, and then it was over. I couldn't guess the big twist at the end, but it felt slightly rushed. This was just ok to me.

Thank you NetGalley and Poisoned Pen Press for an ARC in exchange for my honest and voluntary review.

Read with thanks to Pigeonhole in staves. Mixed review for me, the characters are well written, but there are too many - I'd have dropped some of the friends like AJ and Kelsey, and focused more on the main characters. It's a good story and I enjoyed the writing, but overall was too drawn out and I didn't really like any of the characters. Maybe a bit more time spent with the main characters and we'd have seen more of their redeeming features and been rooting for them. We spotted the twist early on (to be fair we normally do between the Pigeons because of all the commenting), but that was a good plot twist