Stevie‘s review of How To Kill Your Best Friend by Lexie Elliott
Contemporary Psychological Thriller published by Corvus 02 Sep 21
I greatly enjoyed Lexie Elliott’s first novel, although I missed the release of the second. No matter, this third book is another stand-alone story, and once again involves a group of long-term friends dealing with a mysterious death – this time one that occurred more recently. The opening is certainly a kicker: a very short half page chapter musing on one method of committing murder. The story proper begins on the next page, with Georgie arriving late for a memorial service, in completely the wrong clothes.
Georgie, one of a group of thirty-somethings who have been friends since university, if not earlier, has not received the email instructing her to wear white for the ceremony – the result, she assumes, of a new spam filter being installed by her employer’s IT department. The memorial is for Lissa, the second member of the group to die, who is believed to have drowned during a late-night sea swim. Lissa’s body has not yet been recovered, although a fisherman has reported almost retrieving a dead woman matching her description with his catch.
Also present at the remote island resort, where Lissa had been living with her second husband Jem, the resort’s owner-manager, are the three other surviving members of the group: Bron, Duncan, and Adam. The fifth member of the group, Lissa’s first husband, also died in what everyone has so far believed to be a tragic accident. While the main purpose of their visit was to attend the official memorial, the four plan to stay on for a few days to pay their respects to Lissa in less conventional ways, as well as catching up with each other as a group for the first time in several years.
It soon becomes clear that Lissa’s death is not the only problematic issue at the resort. Both Bron and Georgie soon find themselves targeted by a stalker, and when the group go out for a swim in memory of Lissa, they are endangered by both a recklessly piloted tourist boat and by what appears to be the sea monster that locals claim took Lissa. There are also issues with the resort’s finances, and various relationship entanglements past and present emerge to further confuse Georgie and Bron’s feelings around Lissa’s death.
When the women’s lives are directly threatened, Georgie begins to wonder just who is behind various unexplained events, and what really happened to Lissa, but before the group can escape back to their respective homes, a storm hits the island, providing any would-be killer with the perfect opportunity to complete their plans.
I liked the various interjections on methods of murder and how Georgie is helped to put the pieces of the mystery together by the gradual release of her missing emails from the over-enthusiastic spam filter. As with the previous book from the author, I also appreciated the fact that no character is either completely good or completely evil. Well worth reading, and very much worthy of a reread too.
Grade: A
Summary:
The perfect getaway – to get away with murder…
Georgie, Lissa and Bronwyn have been best friends since they met on their college swimming team. Now Lissa is dead – drowned off the coast of the remote island where her second husband owns a luxury resort. But could a star open-water swimmer really have drowned? Or is something more sinister going on?
Brought together for Lissa’s memorial, Georgie, Bron, Lissa’s grieving husband and their friends find themselves questioning the circumstances around Lissa’s death – and each other. As the weather turns ominous, trapping the guests on the island, it slowly dawns on them that Lissa’s death was only the beginning. Nobody knows who they can trust. Or if they’ll make it off the island alive…
Read an excerpt.
