Reviews with content warning for Alcohol - In a Dark, Dark Wood

This felt like more of a mystery than a thriller. <Spoiler>the book starts off with our main character, Nora in the hospital trying to remember everything that happened in order, "starting at the beginning".<Spoiler> it wasn't very thrilling, in my opinion.

The part that bothered me the most is that all the characters acted like they were still in highschool. They all felt very immature for people who were supposed to be in their mid-to-late 20s.

The plot twists and drama didn't do it for me. There was one part that had that classic thriller feel to it, but the rest felt dull to me.

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toofondofbooks_'s review against another edition

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dark emotional mysterious sad tense slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? No
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

3.0

This book is about a bachelorette party gone wrong: murder, mayhem, and spooky shit ensues. I have quite a few complaints about this one but as per usual, I want to start with positives because I like to be generous and also because I did like this book, there were just things I wanted from it that I didn't get. I thought the writing was lovely. Ruth Ware is very obviously great at building suspense, setting the scene for horror, and writing tense scenes between characters. Some of my favorite scenes were scenes where characters were fighting or bitching about one another. I lived for the drama of it all.

My main complaint is this: Reese Witherspoon says on the cover blurb that I'm going to be "really scared." I was not. This book undoubtedly had its moments where I was very invested in figuring out what happened, but there were such long stretches of pages where I felt that things were getting repetitive and if something didn't happen soon, this was going to go into the DNF graveyard. However, a lot of times, the moment I had that thought, something would happen; it just was never scary enough to make me feel anything. I also felt like after a certain point, it was really easy for me to put 2 and 2 together and figure out what the big twist was, which made the whole climax kind of a slog for me.

All in all, I do give this 3 stars because I think it was beautifully written, but perhaps not a favorite story for me specifically.

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