*Thank you to the publisher for sending me a copy of this to review!*

I am so disappointed with this one. I had such high expectations and was expecting an eerie, atmospheric slow burn crime novel but what I got instead was just a bit haphazard and endlessly frustrating. It felt like a Liane Moriarty book at times, but just the bare bones of it. No depth or structure at all.

From the beginning, I was excited by the quick pacing but that fast became a problem (no pun intended). Instead of being snappy, it just felt rushed. This book was too short to try and achieve what it set out to, and as a reader we had no time to properly contemplate what was happening before something else happened. It was just a barrage of nonsense with no cooling periods between intense scenes. And ‘intense’ is a strong word here, this book didn’t really fulfil that criteria of a mystery thriller either. Because of how it was written, it just fell flat.

The writing was pretty straightforward which I didn’t mind, it got the job done, but I hated how it frequently did a disservice to the reader. This was very much a tell not show book, and I hated the implication that I couldn’t read between the lines or get clues from the atmosphere what was going on, everything was explicitly spelled out to me. It became old quickly. Because of how it was written, the words lost a lot of power and impact. This book made me feel nothing. There was a distinct lack of suspense.

The must unbelievable and ridiculous thing to me was the plot of this book. It was honestly just a hot mess, that’s the only way I can explain it. It was so over dramatic but with no depth at all, so as a reader I truly didn’t care about what was happening. Characters were just dropping dead every three pages or so and I almost wished they would go quicker so the book would be over. There was no build up, no explanation, no tension… it gave us nothing a thriller was supposed to give. It was just so disappointing. I spent most of my time reading this book rolling my eyes at how ridiculous I found it.

The ridiculous plot also wasn't helped by the ridiculous characters. Never have I come across a group of people so bland. There was an attempt at giving them personalities. But they were all just caricatures or completely cardboard. I hated them all. And none of them reacted to anything in this book like a normal human being. Everyone was dying, meanwhile they were dressing up to celebrate new years and having tea and biscuits with several dead bodies upstairs? Ok cool, no panic or sense of urgency no problem. I also found their emotional states to be out of whack, why was our protagonist hysterically crying over someone one minute and declaring their love for someone the next? They’re all complete strangers, to make it worse. The speech was off, their behaviour was weird, and none of it felt realistic. Just bizarre.

Don’t even get me started on the ‘plot twist’ ending that viably made no sense. This book agitated me. On a positive, it was very quick to read.