Thoughts: I’m almost indifferent on this one. I just felt like I was rereading The Guest List with the format and the plot. I didn’t dislike it, but it was hard to get into because it felt so similar. A group of college friends go up to the mountains to celebrate NYE together. The story goes back and forth between guests POV and the two employees of the days leading up to and then after a murder happens. You don’t find out until the end who the friend is that died and who did it but they do wrap things up and let you know everything that happened.
Summary: During the languid days of the Christmas break, a group of thirty something friends from Oxford meet to welcome in the New Year together, a tradition they began as students ten years ago. For this vacation, they’ve chosen an idyllic and isolated estate in the Scottish Highlands—the perfect place to get away and unwind by themselves.
The trip begins innocently enough: admiring the stunning if foreboding scenery, champagne in front of a crackling fire, and reminiscences about the past. But after a decade, the weight of secret resentments has grown too heavy for the group’s tenuous nostalgia to bear. Amid the boisterous revelry of New Year’s Eve, the cord holding them together snaps, just as a historic blizzard seals the lodge off from the outside world.
Two days later, on New Year’s Day, one of them is dead. . . and another of them did it.