Oh this one was goooooood... welcome back to my good side Riley Sager, so happy to see you here again!!! There were so many things I enjoyed about this book and let me tell you about them hehe.

So first, this was SPOOKY. Like, couldn't-read-with-the-lights-off, checking-the-closets-for-ghosts spooky. To me, this is such a hard thing to achieve! The setup of the mystery of the island was so well done, and I loved the premise for gathering them all there in an echo of the last gathering of ladies. Once the scary stuff began it was just totally relentless, and I wavered between being unable to put the book down because I was so invested and unable to pick it up because I was so freaked. And the weaving in of the diary was so masterfully done to really dial up the eerie factor. The atmosphere here was just off the charts.

One of the other things this book did so well was inspire me to make guesses and try to puzzle it out. Sometimes in a mystery/thriller we have either too much or too little information, and it can be hard to make a real go at solving it (at least for me, a notorious bad guesser) without going cross-eyed. But this book was the perfect balance of information to form theories on, without there being an obvious (or completely UNGUESSABLE, boo pet peeve) resolution. There were some things I got right, some things I got sort-of right, and some things I got dead wrong. As it should be!!! Or at least as I want it to be.

Want another pro?? We here had a thriller protagonist who was, finally, refreshingly not annoying. Marin wasn't perfect, but she was REASONABLE and for the most part asked so many of the same questions and had the same reactions I think I would've had. She didn't make the dumbest decisions ever for the sake of moving the plot (another pet peeve mmm), and I was grateful that she was someone I could root for without rolling my eyes.

And finally, this was a thriller that stuck the landing. With such an amazing and heart-pounding build-up, I'm always worried a book like this is going to essentially set too high a bar for any realistic explanation. But again, I think Riley Sager fleshed this one out so well and really effectively put the pieces together in a satisfying and sensible way. He may have left a little room for the spooky through the conclusion, but like... it did make sense.

So I started off this review thinking it would be a 4.5 for me rounded down, but I might bump it up to a 5?!?! I just loved the experience of reading this book, and I think all 5 stars just might be warranted. And if you're thinking about reading this and REALLY want it to hit, pick this baby up in October. 👀

Unfortunately I was a little disappointed in this one. The premise sounded so intriguing and I'd say the first half was pretty strong, as we got to know the characters, their histories, and the ways in which they intertwined through past and present timelines. The writing of the past timeline felt a bit weak with mostly surface-level teenage characters, but that's definitely something I could've forgiven for the sake of a stellar plot.

However, the final 25% was so chaotic and uneven that it really undid any of the solid build-up that preceded it. A lot of the "twists" came EXTREMELY close to the end, which didn't leave a lot of time to actually explain them or dive deeply into the motivations and connections. And that lack of a satisfying resolution honestly left me with unresolved feelings and several unanswered questions, and that's really never how I want to turn the last page on a thriller!!

It all wrapped up so quickly but also incompletely that any kind of point or purpose to the narrative was totally lost on me. The events of the past really didn't end up feeling well-connected to the present to me, leaving the book as a whole somewhat disjointed. It was almost like two—or even three!—separate books, because the overlapping plots weren't weaved together as effectively as I expected. There was just tooooo much going on, and trying to squeeze these multiple plots into one coherent story left us with... kind of a mess. Because if you're going to cram the book full of unlikable characters, you really need to dazzle with the other elements.

This was my first Jennifer Hillier read, and I've heard great things so I'm surely NOT ready to write her off!! But for now... it's a miss for me.

[Thank you to NetGalley and St. Martin's Press for an advance reader copy of this book!]