Published By: Aries
Pages: 368
Released On: 13/03/2025
Kirby Cornell needs a break from everything:
– Her crumbling flat in the sleepy town of Crowhurst (famous for its award-winning sausage rolls and a second-rate serial killer from the 90s).
– Her dead-end job.
– Her sleazy landlord.
– Her slobbish housemates.
– And, most of all, the terrible thing they all did.
Luckily, that hasn’t caught up with her just yet. Until a new message on their old group chat pops up:
“Everyone in the group chat will die.”
It’s the first text her ex-flatmate and social-media sleuth Esme has sent for ages, but that’s not the really weird thing.
The really weird thing is, Esme died twelve months ago…
*****
Thanks to NetGalley and Aries for the advanced copy of this title in return for an honest review.
I loved, loved, LOVED Chilton’s previous book Don’t Swipe Right and jumped at the chance to read this new one.
Let’s start with the positives. Literally from page one I could hear all of the characters’ voices like I knew them. I can completely identify with the horrors of sharing accommodation, the takeaways, the fighting over the television remote, the vodka and the itty bitty box room (which I was lumped with).
It’s split into two time periods – the present day and 12 months previous. I know some readers can find them complicated but I like a split time period book as it gives us more background without interrupting the flow of the present scenes.
However, there are more negatives than positives here.
I didn’t find it nearly as gripping as his previous book. It took me longer to get into it and lose myself in – in fact, I’m not sure I did completely lose myself in it.
I felt the characters were interesting, but I didn’t connect with any of them and so I wasn’t really rooting for or against any of them, and therefore I didn’t really care what happened.
It’s very dialogue heavy. Personally I prefer prose-heavy books rather than dialogue, but each to their own. I felt some of it was a bit stumbly, quite unnatural. As bizarre as this is going to sound, it felt like I was reading a made-up conversation in a book which tries to sound natural but it doesn’t reach it. Some books, I get completely lost in the dialogue and you forget it’s all made up, but this one kept reminding me it wasn’t real, which I think is another reason I couldn’t lose myself in it.
I’m not sure what genre to put it in. This won’t be an issue for some people but I do like to know what I’m thinking. So it is a thriller, but also a contemporary piece, sometimes humour and cos y crime – it just felt like it didn’t know what it wanted to be.
It was twisty and turny and exciting but at times I felt there was too much, and some things didn’t work as well and left me a little muddled.
I had such high hopes for this because his previous book was one of my absolute favourites, but this fell short. I have seen five-star reviews for this and I have seen two-star reviews, so I definitely think it’s a personal taste thing, but for me it disappointed sadly.
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