You need to sign in or sign up before continuing.
Take a photo of a barcode or cover
Thank you to NetGalley and Delacorte Press for providing me with an ARC of this novel in exchange for an honest review.
This was a 3.5 for me, rounded down to 3 mostly because of the last line and chapter of the book.
Bessie and her group of very close friends are the type of rich that makes problems disappear. Over a holiday weekend, the friends tell whatever lies necessary to get out of their boarding school without adult supervision so they can go to an abandoned castle owned by one of their families. They will host the best party of the year. But when a torrential rain and wind storm cancels the party and traps the friends in the castle, things go from bad to worse. Someone is picking them off one by one and it seems like the threat is closer than anyone wants to believe.
I enjoy a twisty closed-room murder/thriller and Preston does a good job here of keeping tension high once we get to the point in the narrative where everyone is in the castle. The setting too, is very well done for this kind of story: creepy abandoned and run-down castle, terrible weather, an impassable moat, and hidden rooms. The fact that most of the characters are unlikeable and come off the page as spoiled made me feel better about my own sense of schadenfreude while reading, which I think is necessary in order not to lose your audience.
The last chapter - and specifically the last line of the book - all but ruined this story for me, though. There's just to much "Aha! Tricked ya!....AHA! Tricked ya again!..Just kidding, tricked you AGAIN!" in a short few pages for me and the tricks are not something that the narrative hints enough at for a reader to have discovered on their own or grown to care about. The result is that I was left feeling uninvested in what was supposed to be a big reveal and I didn't care since the necessary details came out of nowhere. Sure, this meant that I couldn't see the end entirely clearly (did guess the killer but not motive), but it also meant that I didn't care about who made it out in the end.
Still a fun read, but not something I'd rush to add to a friend's TBR.
This was a 3.5 for me, rounded down to 3 mostly because of the last line and chapter of the book.
Bessie and her group of very close friends are the type of rich that makes problems disappear. Over a holiday weekend, the friends tell whatever lies necessary to get out of their boarding school without adult supervision so they can go to an abandoned castle owned by one of their families. They will host the best party of the year. But when a torrential rain and wind storm cancels the party and traps the friends in the castle, things go from bad to worse. Someone is picking them off one by one and it seems like the threat is closer than anyone wants to believe.
I enjoy a twisty closed-room murder/thriller and Preston does a good job here of keeping tension high once we get to the point in the narrative where everyone is in the castle. The setting too, is very well done for this kind of story: creepy abandoned and run-down castle, terrible weather, an impassable moat, and hidden rooms. The fact that most of the characters are unlikeable and come off the page as spoiled made me feel better about my own sense of schadenfreude while reading, which I think is necessary in order not to lose your audience.
The last chapter - and specifically the last line of the book - all but ruined this story for me, though. There's just to much "Aha! Tricked ya!....AHA! Tricked ya again!..Just kidding, tricked you AGAIN!" in a short few pages for me and the tricks are not something that the narrative hints enough at for a reader to have discovered on their own or grown to care about. The result is that I was left feeling uninvested in what was supposed to be a big reveal and I didn't care since the necessary details came out of nowhere. Sure, this meant that I couldn't see the end entirely clearly (did guess the killer but not motive), but it also meant that I didn't care about who made it out in the end.
Still a fun read, but not something I'd rush to add to a friend's TBR.