My August book club pick was one that I enjoyed overall, but I have to admit to feeling a bit disappointed at the end. The story itself was intriguing, and it definitely inspired some deep thinking on my part, which I'll explore at the end of this post. I think I just wanted more.
I got this novel through the Amazon Prime First Reads program last year, so this book is a recent publication. It is a true crime style novel that revolves around the unsolved disappearance of a young woman who was last seen on vacation with her four friends who become the prime suspects in the case. I decided to read it in August because that's when the book itself takes place.
Here's a brief synopsis for you: Callie, Lindsey, Tess, and Meg agree to return to Block Island five years after the unsolved disappearance of their friend, Zoe, but only because the blogger who nearly destroyed their lives five years ago is back and threatening to tear it all down around them again. As the former friends reconnect, they reveal the secrets that have been eating them alive the past five years and discover that maybe they didn't know Zoe quite as well as they thought they did.
Before we jump into the review, I think we need to do a quick cast list of the major players, because there are quite a few characters running around in this story.
The Friend Group
- Callie - The rich friend
- Lindsey - The poor friend with anger issues and Zoe's roommate
- Tess - The peacemaker who struggles with insecurity
- Meg - The friend who doesn't trust easy but was in love with Zoe
- Zoe - The glue that held them together
The Antagonizer
- Patricia - The true crime blogger/podcaster who turned the girls into pariahs and essentially tore their friendship apart and is now writing a book about Zoe's case.
Other Characters of Note
- Nathan - Callie's husband
- Fred - Lindsey's 'friend' who was also Zoe's 'friend'
- Ben - Callie's father
- Blake - Zoe's boyfriend who Lindsey liked first
At just under 300 pages, this was a quick read for me. I finished it in less than two days and probably could have easily read it in one sitting if I didn't have anything else going on. The audiobook is just under 10 hours long. It has a 3.9 rating on Amazon and 3.7 on Goodreads, which I think lines up pretty closely with my own opinions.
As always, skip to the end of the post to avoid spoilers.
***Spoilers***
Our book begins with a prologue from Patricia's point of view. She is a true crime blogger trying to grow her following and has just stumbled into the case that will launch her career to new heights. Zoe Gilbert has been missing for a few days at this point, and Patricia has gone to join the search where she finds herself assigned to the same beach as Zoe's core group of friends: Callie, Lindsey, Tess, and Meg.
It's Patricia who finds the one and only piece of evidence that ever washes ashore, a pair of red heart-shaped sunglasses believed to have been Zoe's. Patricia is unlikeable from the very beginning. She is obviously envious of Zoe's friend group and can't understand why they haven't welcomed her, an intense and over-eager stranger, into their midst. When they pick up the sunglasses despite Patricia warning that they're contaminating evidence and then promptly close ranks and effectively lock Patricia out, the budding true crime investigator instantly decides that the four friends must be guilty and proceeds to make their lives a living hell.
Chapter one jumps forward five years, and the four remaining friends are no longer friends. In fact, they rarely, if ever, speak to each other. It's all thanks in large part to Patricia and her meddling and harassment from when Zoe first went missing. Unbeknownst to all four friends, Patricia sneakily arranged for Callie to do a solo interview about Zoe's disappearance on a local news station, which Callie accepted at the urging of her parents. During the interview, Callie is backed into a corner in which she unintentionally implies that she does not trust the other three girls. Meg, Tess, and Lindsey understandably feel betrayed by this, and Callie is banished from the group. Without Zoe and Callie to hold them together, it's not long before the other three drift apart as well.
Now, in the present day, Meg is working her way up in the world of book publishing; Tess is drowning in postpartum life; Lindsey is working a job she hates and barely getting by; and Callie and her husband have just sold their business and are relocating to Block Island. Callie wants to use her move to bring the friend group back together and decides to host a housewarming on the anniversary of Zoe's disappearance. At first the other three don't reply to Callie's invitation, but then Patricia shows up in their lives again.
In the five years since Zoe's disappearance, Patricia has made a name for herself in the true crime community. In addition to growing her following and blog, she hosts a successful true crime podcast and has helped police solve several missing persons cases. Now, she's going back to where it all started and is writing a book about Zoe's disappearance.
Patricia pitches her book to the small company that Meg works for. It's probably not surprising that Meg hasn't told her coworkers about everything that happened with Zoe, and when Patricia's pitch comes in, she tries everything she can to get it thrown out. But true crime sells and eventually she has to come clean when one of the other agents books an in-person meeting with Patricia and the whole team. It's as awkward as you could imagine, and it soon becomes clear that Patricia is up to her old tricks.
After the meeting, Meg responds to the group invitation from Callie to let everyone know that Patricia is back and writing a book about the whole thing. They agree to reunite at Callie's to discuss a plan to deal with everything again.
But Patricia isn't done. She basically threatens Tess into giving her an interview (this comes back to bite Tess in the butt at the housewarming but at the end of the day isn't all that important to the actual plot), and she begins to essentially stalk Lindsey, showing up outside her apartment and at her job. Lindsey's employers were already aware of Patricia's harassment of Lindsey, but because Lindsey is already on thin ice with her job for various other reasons, Patricia's insistent presence leads to Lindsey being fired. As a result, Lindsey ends up going to Block Island a few days early and staying with Callie in an effort to get away from Patricia.
Meanwhile, Lindsey has been spending time with a man named Fred. She's essentially a 'sugar baby'--Fred pays her to go out with him and spend time together but nothing intimate or personal. Eventually, though, their relationship turns into the real deal. Until Lindsey finds a picture of Zoe hidden on Fred's boat. Unsurprisingly, Lindsey has never talked about Zoe to Fred, and Zoe had never mentioned Fred before. Lindsey naturally becomes suspicious that Fred targeted her, so she decides to invite him to Callie's housewarming-slash-memorial-for-Zoe party so that she can see his reaction and decide if he's been conning her this whole time.
Turns out, Fred is the real deal when it comes to Lindsey. He had met Zoe in a business capacity before her disappearance, and while he admits they shared a connection, nothing serious ever came of it and he hadn't seen her for weeks before she went missing. Fred had no idea that Lindsey and Zoe knew each other, let alone that they had been roommates, and when Lindsey found the picture, he didn't know how to explain things without making it worse. Don't worry -- the two of them don't break up, but it was a nice red herring thrown into the mix.
In the unraveling of the Fred mystery, the friends learn that they didn't know everything that had been going on with Zoe leading up to her disappearance. Although she appeared to be successful, Zoe's jewelry business had been struggling, and she was exploring different options for how to turn things around. That's how she met Fred, but another too-good-to-be-true opportunity came along not long after. Callie's father, Ben, offered her an entrepreneurial grant, but the situation was weird. Every meeting that Callie's dad scheduled with Zoe was supposed to include Callie's mom, but she was never present, and Callie's dad always had a plausible excuse for why she couldn't make it. Zoe knew something was off about the whole situation, but the grant was a legitimate thing, and she needed it badly, so she kept going.
We need to backtrack a little bit here to how the friends met. They all attended the same summer camp on Block Island as kids. The first year, though, Callie didn't want to be there. She had been sent off as a sort of punishment after she caught her father kissing another woman and told her mom about it. This detail was mentioned in an almost offhand kind of way, as if it was simply another tool to develop Callie's character as the spoiled, rich kid of the group. It's not until the end of the book that you realize just how important that detail really was.
As adults, the five friends returned to Block Island in August for one week each year. The last time Zoe was seen was on the last day of their final friend trip. While the other four took the ferry back to the mainland, Zoe stayed behind. What her friends didn't know was that she was meeting Callie's father on his yacht for another meeting about the grant he had offered her. It wasn't until the next day that anyone realized she hadn't come back.
It takes all four friends to figure out what really happened once everyone left the island and why Patricia was determined to paint them as the bad guys. Patricia told both Tess and Meg that she knew Callie and Lindsey were lying about their alibis the night Zoe went missing. Patricia was only right about Lindsey, though.
Lindsey told police she'd been home at her and Zoe's apartment and thought Zoe was still in bed when she went to work the next morning. In reality, when Lindsey got back to the apartment, Zoe's boyfriend, Blake, had shown up and wouldn't leave. Lindsey had liked Blake first, but somehow Zoe ended up with him, and Lindsey had never really forgiven her for that. One thing led to another, and Lindsey ended up spending the night with Blake at his apartment. When she came home the next morning to change for work, she didn't even look to see if Zoe was there because she was ashamed of what she had done and had kept the secret for the last five years.
Patricia did not believe that Callie had ever left the island, despite the fact that she got onto the ferry with the other three. Patricia had been pursuing this angle for five years because she believed she saw Callie at the docks that night getting on her family's yacht. She didn't. Who she actually saw was Zoe. Going to meet Callie's father.
This all comes to light when Lindsey shows her friends the photo she found on Fred's boat and Callie recognizes her family's old yacht. Confused as to why anyone would have a picture of Zoe on her family's yacht, Callie takes the picture to ask her father. Callie's father is in the early stages of dementia, prone to episodes of confusion and rambling. When he sees the photo of Zoe, he admits to offering her a grant for her jewelry business and makes comments about reminding her not to go on the front of the boat. Eventually, after Callie's mom angrily admits that her dad is a dirty sleazebag who preys on young women, they're able to discern that he took Zoe out on the boat just the two of them and that she fell overboard and he left her.
The book ends with a flashback chapter told from Zoe's point of view. It starts with her meeting Callie's father while out with Fred and him offering the grant to her. It goes through all the weird meetings without Callie's mom, then to the the final night of the friends' final Block Island vacation week. We learn about her fight with Lindsey over Blake. Her fight with Tess when Tess tries to get her to open up about what's been bothering her all week. We get to hear Meg confess her love and Zoe gently turn her down. Then the next morning, the rush of them all oversleeping. Finally, Zoe tells her friends goodbye at the ferry and heads to the marina.
***End Spoilers***
So, final thoughts. I already told you right off the bat that this one was a bit disappointing for me. I was expecting more suspense and danger, but there just wasn't any. On top of that, I felt like the story itself was incomplete. I have questions, people!
First, why was Patricia so obsessed with this case in particular? It's not like it was the first one she had ever "investigated." Also, why was she so bent on proving that Zoe's friends were the guilty party? She had zero proof of wrongdoing other than them handling the sunglasses that day on the beach, an act that was deemed insignificant by the police almost immediately. Truly, Patricia came across as a jealous, insecure girl who was butt-hurt that the four friends didn't immediately invite her into their group, but surely there's more to her motivation for destroying their friendship and lives than simple jealousy.
For Patricia to have been such an integral part in the downfall of the main characters, I felt like her storyline was incomplete. I need to know what happened to her reputation as a true crime 'expert' when all was said and done. I hope it took a major hit since she was such a truly awful person to these women. I mean, literally every single one of her theories was wrong. Every single one.
Like I've already mentioned, there really wasn't any true element of danger. There was some surprise, sure, but the suspense was basically nonexistent, and the only real danger was when Tess went off on her own after dark and ended up falling down a hill.
I did appreciate the few red herrings that were thrown in, although only one was truly noteworthy in my opinion (Fred).
Overall, this book felt a bit like Pretty Little Liars to me, although the missing friend doesn't come back from the dead. I was halfway expecting for Zoe to show up in the end, though, what with all the references to secrets, especially those texts from Callie to the unknown person essentially saying she couldn't wait for everyone to see them. It turned out to be Zoe's parents, and I'll admit I was disappointed in that revelation. I was really thinking that Zoe was going to show up at the party and out Fred as some kind of serial killer stalker. Clearly, that was not the case. So I guess good job on that misleading arc.
The ending was almost unsatisfying, to be honest. I mean, was justice actually served? Did anyone really find closure? Sure, they now know what happened to Zoe, but did it have to come at Callie's expense? Out of all of them, I think she might have suffered the most, despite the seemingly perfect appearance of her life after Zoe's disappearance. I mean, she lost all her friends and now runs the risk of losing them all again.
So, yeah. This one has mixed reviews from me. It definitely has inspired a lot of thought, though I'm not much into true crime, so maybe that was the point. I imagine that most crimes of this nature aren't cut and dried, that relationships suffer and break in the aftermath, and that even when justice is supposedly served it often feels hollow.
Final verdict -- if you like true crime, give The Housewarming a shot. And be prepared to hate Patricia. She's awful.
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