I had really high hopes for this novel – sadly it didn’t meet them.

Long time friends, Cassie, Anna, Bo and Rex meet at a music festival and get separated. Catching up with each other afterwards, they witness a woman being assaulted, and caught up in the post-festival feeling, they don’t intervene – in fact they just walk away and pretend nothing happened. A few days later, the victim’s body turns up in the river. Seeing it on the news and in the local paper, a guilt-stricken Cassie asks the question – are the group guilty for not doing anything? Did they inadvertently cause her death?

The group go away for a planned weekend one of their regular little breaks – sans partners, children, just the four of them. It’s a weird little group with a strange dynamic. They seem less friends and more acquaintances; people who keep meeting and getting together out of a sense of duty and sentimentality for the past, rather than because they want to. As the book goes on it becomes obvious that the random events of the night of the murder are perhaps not so random, and the murdered stranger, perhaps not a stranger to them all. 

Cassie is the main focus of the book, with her ex-boyfriend-turned-gay-friend Rex, obnoxious rich boy Bo, and the self-obsessed, selfish, high-maintenance Anna. I’m afraid I didn’t like any of these people and this perhaps affected my enjoyment of the story as I didn’t feel connected to any of them. I just didn’t care what they did or how the story turned out. I did read to the end, but purely so I could give a fair review.

2/5

Thanks for Netgalley for an advance copy of this book in return for an honest review.