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A wealthy group of friends goes to the isolated estate in the Scottish Highlands to celebrate New Year’s Eve. We immediately learn that a body has been found, but we are not told whose. It seems one of the friends has been killed and another one is the killer.
The book jumps back and forth between the present and the past. In the present we follow Heather and Doug, who work at the estate and who are telling us about the body while the past is narrated by three of the group members – we see their arrival in the wilderness and all the events leading up to the murder.
All the characters are kind of unlikeable. They are rich, they flaunt their wealth and they are not exactly good people. The reader immediately notices the hidden tensions and dislikes within the group.
The character work here is amazing. Each person is unique and clearly stands on their own. They all have distinct personalities and a specific way of reacting to things.
I loved the way in which friendship was portrayed. Friends know each other well, over the years they learned to accept each other’s flaws and found the best way to approach each individual within the group. As they age life gets in the way and they can’t see each other all the time, yet they stay close. This is realistic and works well with other themes in the story.
We see that no one is perfect, that we don’t know what is going on behind the scenes, that anyone can wear a mask or hide some darker tendences.
I loved the two twists at the end and how they relate to certain themes – dark aspects of the human mind, trusting the wrong person and not paying attention to some things.
This book was easy and fun to read. Having said that, it was a little too long for a thriller. It needed a long setup to introduce the characters and their interpersonal relationships and that’s ultimately what the story is about, but had the ending been just some 30-50 pages shorter the book would have been perfect.
I haven’t read many thrillers before and that might have been one of the reasons why I was so impressed by this book. Regardless, it had a familiar sense of mystery, yet it was kind of raw, more realistic than what I’m used to and I loved it.