I decided to pick up this book on my last trip to Waterstones
after reading several good reviews online. We get to meet a group who have been
friends since university who go on holiday together every year to celebrate New
Years Eve.
I found the first chapter was really short and snappy and
this was really refreshing as well as setting the tone for the book overall. The
story starts with the staff at the highland estate the group are staying at discovering
a body before jumping back in time a few days to when they were travelling up
on the train from London. This jumping backwards and forwards in time becomes a
staple within the book and after the first third it really started to wear on
me, along with the multiple points of narration coming from the different characters.
I also struggled with the fact that I didn’t find any of the
characters particularly likeable, they all seemed to have their own dark secret
from the past which does help to add to the air of mystery surrounding the murder,
but it doesn’t do anything to make them more relatable. They all seemed to have
violent tempers or incredibly vicious malicious sides which come out with
little to no provocation. As with any group of people who have known each other
for so long there is a lot of history, which just makes the story seem messier
as everyone is well and truly tangled up with one another.
We don’t discover who has been murdered until the last hundred
pages or so of the book, and while I admire how the author was able to spin the
story without giving away that detail, I also found it incredibly frustrating. The
book was very very VERY slow and I had to physically make myself sit and
read it as I was determined not to DNF another book this year. Overall I don’t recommend
this book, which is a shame as the storyline had such great potential.
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