A review by meeklovestoread
What Lies in the Woods by Kate Alice Marshall

dark mysterious tense medium-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? A mix
  • Strong character development? It's complicated
  • Loveable characters? It's complicated
  • Diverse cast of characters? No
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

3.5

I've seen this book all over bookstagram with rave reviews on how good and twisty it was and it was plumped with a lot of my favorite thrillers so best believe I was excited when I finally got my hands on it. Well, sadly this book fell flat for me.

It took until we got pasted the first 100 pages for me to actually get excited about what was going on. 
aka Noami they found that Liv died and now she's trying to pick up where Liv left off 
After that, that's when I think the story actually picked up. And I was pretty interested. I was finally seeing what people were talking about, but that feeling was later shot (no pun intended considering what happens 😂) the last 50-ish pages. 
The twist that it had been Liv that stabbed Naomi was very underwhelming and quite frankly made me upset. I thought we were past stigmatizing mentally ill people as violent psychotic potential killers. I'm glad the author later corrected this assumption.
 

I also, guess many of the twists. 
I wasn't surprised when we found out that Ethan was AJ and that Cass was involved in the end, and that she manipulated Liv into stabbing Noami and then took it upon herself to finish the job. I do have to admit I didn't guess that Cody would be involved and that he accidentally killed Jessi.
This usually isn't a factor in how I rated books. I don't really care if a thriller is predictable as long as I'm having a good time and the suspense is good, however, due to how much this thriller was hyped I was expecting the twists to be mind-blowing so I was highly disappointed which made for a not-so-good reading experience in the end. Lowkey felt like the author added these twists for the sake of their being a big twist. I just don't think it correlated with the story well. I also felt like the ending was a bit rushed.

Now, I didn't hate this book by any means. It has a lot of entertaining components and a decent amount of suspense to make you want to know more. However, if you read this I don't want you to go in expecting anything crazy or phenomenal. I feel like if you're looking for a basic thriller with a decent amount of suspense and a not-so-crazy plot twist then you may consider giving the book a try. 
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