Rating: 3 out of 5.

Twenty-five years ago Barb, Nicolette, and Lorelei were best friends in small town Seaside. They meet a drifter named Sam at an amusement park and they all go to the drive-in. The girls have a fight and the last time Barb and Nicolette see Lorelei is when they left her at the drive-in with Sam. A few days later Lorelei’s body turns up in a cranberry bog and Sam is later arrested. He confesses to killing 4 other girls besides Lorelei and goes to prison.

Present day – Barb is still stuck in Seaside working at a struggling newspaper and Nicolette is a trophy wife on a reality tv show going by the name Cole. After a media faux pas Nicolette/Cole escapes the big city and returns to Seaside and her estranged family. She’s facing the perfect storm of bad publicity, an upcoming documentary about Lorelei’s murder, tv show contract negotiations, the re-opening of an amusement park where the girls met Sam, and her estranged friend Barb. Then Sam recants his confession and claims he didn’t kill Lorelei. So if he didn’t, who did?

The book is set in present day with flashbacks to the events 25 years ago before and after Lorelei’s murder and told in multiple character’s POV. There are storylines involving infidelity, an accidental pregnancy, bad adults doing bad things, contract negotiations, and missing reality stars. I think the book tries to do too much and a lot of the side stories were unnecessary and distracted from the main storyline. Every time the book drifted off to a side story, it lost my attention. It felt like the most important storyline, who killed Lorelei, was in the background of everything else going on.

Most of the characters were unlikeable and ironically, the serial killer was the most interesting one in the book. I listened to the audio and Sam’s narrator did a fantastic job portraying him as a charming sleazebag. His silky smooth voice and flirty charm lull you into thinking maybe he’s not so bad, and then his true colors show and you’re in the spider’s trap. The other narrators also did a great job expressing the snarky attitude of teenage frenemies and privileged women that are hot messes. The middle part of the book was very slow. I think if I had not been listening to it, I may have DNF’d it but the narrators kept me going.

I love many of the author’s previous books but unfortunately this book disappointed me. Normally I can always count on the author to creep me out and tell an interesting story – it just fell short here. While the book is well written, I missed that dark creep factor the author had in her previous books. But that’s just me. Check the book out for yourself and see if you agree with me or not.

I received a complimentary audio of this book from Macmillan Publishing. All opinions are my own.