What readers say
i’m so sad because this book has been something i’ve wanted to read for a while and it ended up disappointing me. i’m not sure if im just growing out of thrillers as a genre, but this read so boring to me and the prose was very bland. there were so many characters introduced (with the same names too) which was very hard to follow until about 60% in. the story jumped timelines from a date in the past, to the present, back to different dates in the past, which was also a little tricky and complicated to follow. i wanted to be shocked by the ending but it fell a little flat for me, with some of the ‘twists’ feeling predictable and just a little boring. the story takes place in 1975 but also some years before it. setting is a summer camp on a rich family’s preserve of land. the daughter of the rich family (who is also a camper) ends up going missing, only a few years after her brother went missing and was never found. various side characters include- a runaway serial killer from the local prison, the rich family’s lawyer friends, camp counselors and CITS, a groundskeeper accused of murdering the son who was never found, the mother of the two missing children who is mentally abused by her husband, and so on. i expected this to be a bit more of a slasher thriller, but it wasn’t like that at all. it had more of a detective/ james patterson feeling to it. not a bad read and eventually kept me flipping to find out what happened but nothing shocking ever happened (in my opinion) which was a little disappointing.
welp this was a struggle. why were there so many POVs??! there were so many characters and different POVs that i never felt connected to a single one, which made it really hard to stay invested in the story. by the time the mystery started coming together, i honestly didn’t even care about the outcome anymore. this book dragged endlessly and felt at least 200 pages longer than it needed to be. it genuinely felt like the author was trying to hit a word count rather than tell a tighter, more compelling story. i listened on audio and it was a struggle to get through even on 2.15 speed. there were moments where i could see the potential for a solid mystery/thriller, but the execution just didn’t work for me. and that ending? completely unsatisfying. not only did it leave me disappointed, but it also felt incredibly unrealistic. i was so close to buying a copy of this book, and after finishing it, i’m very glad i didn’t.