Published by Harper Collins

Synopsis:

EVERYONE’S INVITED.
EVERYONE’S A SUSPECT.

Bristling with tension, bitter rivalries, and toxic friendships, get ready for the most hotly-anticipated thriller of 2019.

In a remote hunting lodge, deep in the Scottish wilderness, old friends gather for New Year.

The beautiful one
The golden couple
The volatile one
The new parents
The quiet one
The city boy
The outsider

The victim.

Not an accident – a murder among friends.

Expected publication date: January 24th 2019

If you like your thrillers thrilling and your plots character driven, I have found just the book for you.

The premise is a classic, a bunch of old friends get together in a remote location and somebody tragically dies…. Was is a spouse? A friend? The grumpy groundskeeper? Only time and a wonderful narrative will tell.

It really is a treat though, the main characters are a group of old university friends getting together for their traditional New Year getaway. It’s been a few years since they all graduated and translating friendships from those years to mature adult relationships is hard work (don’t I know it!), some of them are only friends out of habit and they still have a complicated shared history of all the stupid things they’ve done together, which is just waiting to come back and bite them once booze is involved.

The chapters alternate between perspectives, which is really great because you get to read about the same past events through the eyes of different characters and get a better picture of how their minds work. Obviously, some of the characters are more reliable than others and there are a few with dark pasts that are very slowly dragged out of them at a frustrating pace but it’s worth it! Best of all, not all of the characters are likable – they’ve done shitty things in the past, like every other person on the planet, and that just makes it all the juicer.

Another thing that I liked was that it was set in rural Scotland, but the total isolation of the area isn’t romanticised – it’s a dangerous place to be when the weather cuts them off, with no phone signal or access to basic amenities. As a result, it makes the entire story more atmospheric and tense rather than waxing lyrical about lochs and pine trees (both of which are beautiful, but probably not what you’re noticing when someone’s been murdered). If you get a chance, read this book when it’s snowy and cold out for added thrills…

I adored Foley’s writing style with this book and couldn’t put it down, I’ll happily pick up anything she’s written from now on without question.