A group of friends decide to to spend their New Year in a lodge miles away from anywhere in the wilds of Scotland. It will just be them, the lodge manager, and hunting instructor. They are planning on having fun, drinking, eating rich foods, and going hunting. They each bring with them their own emotional baggage and their secrets, but they are all good friends and there shouldn't be any problems, right? Wrong. By New Year's Day, one of them will be dead. And one of them is the murderer.
I just loved the premise of this story, and I liked the way that each chapter is told from the perspective of each of the friends (though a tad confusing at times). They relate how they know each other, and what they truly think of each other. The lodge owner and the instructor also get to tell their own stories of how they ended up working in such a remote location. As we learn more about their characters, we are led to be suspicious of most of them, and try to work out who could be the murderer. The only downside of this toing and froing of characters, is that you lose the tension of mystery and thriller. However, I loved the descriptions of how the friends are cocooned in this lodge, with lights on, gathered around a big table having fun, but through the large glass floor to ceiling windows all they can see is the blackness of the outside, and the snow starting to cover the ground, and the fact that they can't see much out, but anyone outside can see straight in.
I can't say that it kept me on the edge of my seat, but I did enjoy reading it. It was overlong though, I did skim read a few pages. I also didn't really like any of the characters, but that's possibly the point - any of them could be a murderer. A good, but not brilliant, murder mystery.
13 year old Sal and her 10 year old sister Peppa are on the run. They've had to escape a brutal past and an even more brutal end to the past. But Sal is prepared - she has all the kit for survival in the Scottish wilderness. Her backpack is filled with maps, waterproof clothing, food, penknife, fishing gear and the SAS Survival Handbook. She's watched enough YouTube survival videos to become the next Bear Grylls. But life in the woods in October is tough - it's cold and snowing. How long can they hide out before someone finds them?
When I started to read this, I wasn't sure I was going to like it, even though I loved the premise of the story. The detail of their first few days in the forest was slight overkill for me. Many of the descriptions seemed almost like word-for-word transcript out of a manual, and I skipped most of those parts. For me, it started to get interesting when Ingrid's character was introduced (even though it was a rather unbelievable coincidence that someone else was hiding out in the same forest). I loved their relationship, and the story just seemed to quickly build from there. I loved the banter between the sisters, and how Sal kept trying so hard to keep Peppa's spirits up, while trying at the same time to keep them both alive. Through her abusive past, Sal has had to quickly grow up, and she is a believable strong mother figure to her sister.
A marvelous debut novel.
