Description
Gone Girl meets Suicide Notes from Beautiful Girls in this mesmerizing debut novel about a toxic friendship that turns deadly.
Remy Tsai used to know how her story would turn out. But now, she doesn’t even know what tomorrow will look like.
She was happy once. Remy had her boyfriend Jack, and Elise, her best friend—her soul mate—who understood her better than anyone else in the world.
But now Jack is dead, shot through the chest…
And it was Elise who pulled the trigger.
Was it self-defense? Or something darker than anything Remy could have imagined? As the police investigate, Remy does the same, sifting through her own memories, looking for a scrap of truth that could save the friendship that means everything to her.
Told in alternating timelines, this twisted psychological thriller explores the dark side of obsessive friendship.
From small cracks, big cracks grow.
Review
This is an incredible psychological thriller with an amazing, evolving, toxic friendship that winds itself around the whole story.
First we have Remy, a second child with a superstar older brother - think school captain and overall perfect child - who live with their constantly arguing parents. It’s nothing physical, but they are always at each other’s throats. And Remi will just never be good enough for her brain surgeon mother.
In comes new best friend Elise - her mother left her when she was young, and has an abusive father. She slowly takes over Remy’s life and they start pranking bad people to make the world a bit fairer.
Then Remy meets Jack and as she spends more time with him, Elise gets more needy. Elise’s pranking escalates and in the end we have her holding a gun with Jack shot numerous times in the chest. But Remy tells the police it was an accident. What really happened? The story slowly unravels with a terrifying ending.
Adding to the intrigue is that you are never quite sure how reliable our narrator Remy’s version of events really is...
With themes of child abuse, toxic friendship, dysfunctional families and some language, this will certainly appeal to older teenage readers 15 +. The story itself was sharp, intense and with heart-thumping tension that made it very hard to put down.
Reviewed by Rob
