Remains are discovered hidden in a hideaway in the forest. It is quickly determined that they are the remains of Aurora Jackson, a teen who went missing 30 years ago after a camping trip with a group of her sister's friends. The book then alternates between the investigation, and the events 30 years ago, until the killer is discovered.

This book was really good. It kept me guessing up until the very end. I liked how every one of those teenagers, as well as some other people, potentially had a motive. That and the fact that everyone was acting sketchy through the whole investigation made it fun to read and try to guess who did it. Definitely a must-read for mystery readers!

*** 4 stars ***

This was a slow start for me and a little confusing at first. Introducing 6 friends at a campsite where a young girl, Aurora, went missing in 1983 alternating with present day involving an investigation into Aurora's disappearance when her body is discovered 30 years later, didn't grab all of my attention at first. But slowly as the characters developed and the story line progressed this one grew on me. I thought I had her murderer figured out early on but then began second guessing myself and was pleasantly surprised with the ending.
One thing I will say, this is a debut book in a new series regarding DCI Jonah Sheens and I didn't think there was much development regarding DCI Sheens' character. On one hand this may mean this series will be able to be stand alone novels, not needing to be read in order but on the other hand, I'm not very interested in him as a detective. Also, there is another detective Hanson who is investigating Aurora's disappearance and throughout the book it refers to her angry ex-boyfriend and his text messages. I didn't really understand the purpose of this unless her character is being developed for later in the series? Overall, this was solid read, good mystery and I look forward to what the next book in the series will bring.

Thanks to NetGalley and Penguin for allowing me an ARC in exchange for an honest review.

This book simply didn't work for me. It had everything I was supposed to like in a thriller (missing girls, dead bodies, the past portion takes place in the 80's). However, the book had a confusing set up as it gave the points of views of many people, and they weren't even that interesting to be honest. At one point reading it felt like a chore so I just stopped, especially when I have so many other books on my list to read. However, if you're into procedural police reports type stories then this book would work for you. Sadly, it didn't for me.

She Lies in Wait by Gytha Lodge

Brief Summary: Seven teenagers go out camping in the woods for a night of drinking, drugs, and hooking up; but only six survive. 30 years later the remains of the lost teen are discovered and the cold case reopens. In a group of six friends who is telling the truth and who is lying?

Highlights: The premise of this story sounds promising but it’s slow to build. The group dynamics of the friend group were interesting. It does turn into a page-turner in the last 20% of the book. I did like that one narrator is DC Sheens, rather than the unrealiable narrators in typical psychological fiction. It was also interesting to see the behind the scenes police team work.

Explanation of Rating: 3/5 I don’t think the plot ties well enough together until the very end when it is all spelled out. There are several aspects that came out at the end that don’t seem to fit. I didn’t really feel a connection to any of the characters. I wasn’t really rooting for or against any of them. I had high hopes for this novel but was ultimately disappointed.

I think there are better choices out there for psychological thriller fans. This may be more interesting or appropriate for police procedure fans. For me, this book was just okay. This is the first book in a series and I hope that the succeeding novels improve in suspense. I would certainly consider reading the next installment but it would depend on my other choices at the time.

Thank you to Net Galley and Random House for an ARC of this novel in exchange for an honest review

I found this book to be a fun and interesting mystery. Who done it was maintained throughout the book. At times it became a slow read, resulting in four-stars rather than five.

I really enjoyed reading this book. It is about 6 friends who go camping over a weekend in 1983. There were drugs and alcohol and during the course of their time in the woods one of the girls go missing. Thirty years later her remains are found and the search for the killer begins again.
I liked the way the story went from past to present which allows the reader to know the characters as teenagers as well as adults.
There was a lot of detailed police work described also which I found interesting.. This was a great who-dun-it with lots of twists and turns and a surprise ending.

Thank you Net Galley for allowing me to read this incredible book.

I'm a mood reader (and watcher) and my current mood is, thanks to the ITV show Midsomer Murders and Netflix, fictional British detectives. I'm not talking Sherlock Holmes or anything big city and edgy and grim (I'm looking at you Luther even though I love you too). I'm talking murder most foul, as it were, in the picturesque English countryside (where I do want to travel one day... as soon as I win the lottery here in America, I suppose). This is what I want to watch right now, it is what I want to read right now.

So Gytha Lodge's She Lies in Wait, the first book in a series about DCI Jonah Sheens, is the perfect fit for me.

Lodge has crafted a present-day story based around a thirty year old case. It's the story of a group of teenage friends (Topaz, Coralie, Jojo, Brett, Daniel, and Connor) who decided to go camping in 1983. Camping is the word they use for alcohol, drugs, and sex. And they take Topaz's fourteen-year-old sister along. It is Aurora Jackson who is at the center of the present-day case being investigated by DCI Jonah Sheens.

The DCI is in what seems to be a bit of spot because he was only a few years old than the six of them in 1983, and even attended parties they threw. And now he is sure that one of them murdered the youngest of the group. The way he works carefully to balance his personal interest and maybe involvement with the people of interest threatens to upend his team of investigators.

The cast of characters is large - a group of six friends, a teacher, parents of the missing girl, the DCI, three investigators on his team - but they are all interesting. They are all well-developed and they are fun to read, as much despite their flaws as because of their flaws. DCI Sheens and his team will obviously have roles in the next book in the series, one which I do very much want to read. There is much more to be learned about them... who is Damian and what did he do to Juliette Hanson that has her running from him despite her job with the police? is there some family in Jonah Sheens' life, as alluded to in a few places? will Jonah enter into a romance with Jojo?

I could go on.

But I won't. What I'll say is this - it was a pleasure to read She Lies in Wait and if crime fiction, murder mysteries, and (English) detective stories are your Book Mood of the moment, this book is available for purchase in the United States on January 8, 2019 and you really should read it!

(I received a copy of She Lies in Wait from Random House through NetGalley in exchange for an honest review. All thoughts are my own.)

OH MY GOSH! I thought I had read some of the best psychological thrillers out there. And then came this book...I'm speechless after this read. The twists and turns of this book kept me hooked until the very end. And after I finished, I wanted more. I've told all my friends about this book and the exact date it officially hits the shelf. I plan to re-read it once my entire circle has it. Phenomenal read!

I received an ARC of this novel from Netgalley in exchange for an honest review

I absolutely love this book. I was drawn in by the flawed characters and their life choices. The ending was satisfying--there was fireshadiwing on all the characters, and I had no idea who the guilty party would be until the end.

I was all over that cover and tag line and synopsis and sadly, I only made it to 40% before skipping to read the last 4 chapters.

I liked Jonah well enough. He seems like a stand up guy, but in the amount that I read, I couldn’t tell you that for sure. There are loads of characters and we get several POVs in each chapter. And yet, I didn’t feel connected to any of them. If this was on purpose to make me unable to trust anyone, it missed the mark.

Plot wise, it is insanely slow. I did like the alternating chapters of past and present, especially with the past chapters in Aurora’s POV. When I read the last few chapters, I wasn’t surprised by what happened and how. It seemed a bit obvious and that made me uninterested in going back to read the rest.

Overall, it lacked the urgency or tension I was expecting. Understandably, with a case that’s 30 years old, that’s bound to be missing, yet I just couldn’t click with it. Jonah’s character does have some promise and I might be interested in future books.

FYI: there is a drugging and fade to black rape scene. There are mentions of several other rapes committed by the murderer.

**Huge thanks to Random House for providing the arc free of charge**

DNF at 25%. Unfortunately this book just didn’t work for me. At the beginning of the story, a body is found of a teenager who went missing 30 years ago. The book then alternates between the police reinvestigating the case in the present day and alternating chapters going back to right before the girl went missing.

I wanted to like this book but it just wasn’t working for me. Each time I picked it up it felt like I was forcing myself to read it when there are other books I would much rather be reading. At this point, I am deciding to put this one down as not for me.

Thank you very much to Netgalley and the publisher for the free copy in exchange for my honest review.

I have a frustration.

The blurb for this book is RIGHT up my alley. In the early 80's, six high school friends go camping in the woods, with dreams of drinking, getting high, and getting up to general teenaged hooligan shenanigans. The main girl of the group, the unfortunately named Topaz, is...talked into? Coerced into? Forced into? Bringing her younger sister, Aurora. A sweet, shy 14-year old girl who has just come into her own after being the gangly, awkward younger sister.

The next morning, everyone wakes up super hungover and maybe still a little drunk, to discover Aurora is missing.

30 years later, her body is found. In the same camping area where they all had been. Questions are asked, and now these tight knit friends have to wonder if they've been commiserating with a murderer all this time.

Sounds like a fantastic murder mystery and thriller, right?

Except that's not what we have here. This isn't a thriller. It's a police procedural.

Police procedurals have their place in the murder mystery genre, but that is not what I expected from this novel. This book focuses so heavily on the police investigating the original crime that it barely touches on the personalities of our six suspects. We know Aurora only as she was on the night of the crime, as told in flashbacks cut in between chapters focusing on the police officers. We barely know anything else about her, though tidbits are dangled before our eyes, then snatched away as we learn about the texts the over eager officer is getting from her abusive boyfriend.

You will have sympathy for Aurora, because what happens to her is truly horrifying. But you can't, and won't, care about the other suspects. There's a redemptive arc for a couple of characters that isn't even deserved. They start out horrible, and do nothing to prove they were good people, then at the end it's like, "And now they were free to be you and me" except they were still horrible people. We didn't even get a pity, throw-away comment about how much they donated to charity or something.

I would love to say that this is well done because I didn't see the ending coming at all. Which is true, I didn't know who'd done it until it was revealed. But that's because I spent far too much time listening to Jonah talk about how many times he'd forgotten to eat lunch.

This should've been good. The idea is fantastic. This was not.

This story is basically a police procedural which solves the mystery of what happened to Aurora Johnson while camping out with her sister and her sister's friends in 1983. It's 30 years later when her body is aacidentally found by a young girl camping in the same area with her family. Following the process was interesting.

She Lies in Wait by Gytha Lodge is a suspenseful story of six teenagers out for a camping, firebuilding and drinking night, one of the teenagers brings her very young sister who doesn't make it back with the others. Her body is found thirty years later. I really enjoyed the story and the characters although it seemed to take a while to put it all together and wrap it up. I very much liked the storyline behind the lead detective and his relationship to the teenagers. Thank you for the chance to read this early! #netgalley.com#SheLiesInWait#RandomHouse

An Ambiguous Plot That Works But Not Well
The novel opens with the discovery of a skeleton in some woods. The victim was identified as Aurora Jackson, a 14 year old. She was raped and died 35 years earlier while on camping trip with her older sister and five friends. The book covers states, “Six friends, one killer, who do you trust?” The cast of witnesses and possible suspects isn’t limited to those six. There are a teacher with his current and previous girlfriends, a drug dealer, and spouses of the six who did not marry within the group. To top it off, DCI Jonah Sheens, the lead detective on the case is a contemporary of the six and had interacted with several of them 35 years ago. A death of one of the group’s spouse three years before the time of the novel now becomes important.

Obviously, this is a rich mixture with which to create a marvelous story to draw the readers into the story, to make them think through all the twists and turns, and to try to figure out where the story leads. Unfortunately, it can overload the reader. That is what happened to me. This novel did not set its hooks into my imagination so that I wanted to read this novel over other activities, like sleeping. This novel took me over a month to complete that is two to three times what I usually spend with a novel of this length. Every time I picked it up to read, I had to search names to familiarize myself with who is who and pick up the story where I lead off.

The B-storyline was rich for DCI Jonah Sheens, but for the first novel in a series this level of background is adequate. For DC Juliette Hanson the B-story line was a little thinner. Outside her job, there was only one significant story line about her. At the end of the novel this thread was a loose end. Here, I am assuming that it will continue in the next novel.

As for language, nothing stood out as excessive and unacceptable. In fact after reading the novel, I used the search capability of Kindle and discovered the F-bomb every seven pages. There was an equivalent amount of other less vulgar language. There are not any graphic sex scenes, but the story does cover two rapes and sex among the group on the camping trip. I personally did not find any of these in excess and not a deterrent to reading this novel.

If you are an American as I am, I strongly recommend reading this novel on Kindle or any device that has access to a good dictionary and the Internet. As this is novel set in Britain, there is much use of British informal language that access to the Kindle dictionary was frequently needed. This novel required that I use the Internet much more often for previous British police procedurals to find the meaning of some words and phrases.

Overall, the novel has an ambiguous plot. While the author wrote well and did everything that should have captured my attention and be an enjoyable read, it turned out for me to be a drudgery to continue reading. It was not a bad read, neither was it a good read for me. This is the major reason that I rate this novel with three stars. Some of you may find this novel a page turner, but some may find it to be the exact opposite. You must decide.

I have received a free kindle version of this novel through NetGalley from Random House with a request for an honest, unbiased review. I wish to thank Random House for the opportunity to read this novel early.

She Lies in Wait by Gytha Lodge is the first book in the new police procedural thriller DCI Jonah Sheens series. This first book of the series has our new detectives in search of a killer from a cold case that is over thirty years old. The chapters alternate between the current investigation and the past when the young girl had gone missing.

In July of 1983 Aurora Jackson had gone on a camping trip with her older sister Topaz and Topaz’s friends. Being a few years younger than the group Aurora was nervous and excited to finally be included with the others but when the partying started Aurora was definitely out of her element.

Now more than thirty years later a bone is found not too far away from that original campsite and when tested it’s found to belong to the missing Aurora. Jonah Sheens is put in charge of the case and determined to find out just what happened back then when he was just starting his career as a policemen.

Well, when finished with She Lies in Wait really the best I could come up with would be well, it’s OK. This one unfortunately was just one of those titles that really didn’t seem to grab me much at all and just seemed to be there. There isn’t anything really particularly wrong with it other than maybe dragging here and there but the characters just weren’t ones I connected with. Perhaps the series will pick up the intensity but only 3 stars for this opener so far.

I received an advance copy from the publisher via NetGalley.

A young girl at the campgrounds with her family, trying to stay hidden because her dad keeps hollering for her to come on, don't get dirty, stay out of this or that, nagging. Trying her best not to be seen she climbs into the hollow part of an old tree, ends up getting her shorts snagged as she sits down into hollowed out part, something starts poking at her leg, she assumes it's the tree roots until she looks down and finds a human finger in her hands. BAM! DCI Jonah Sheens has himself a crime scene.

I really wanted to like this this book so bad. When I read the synopsis, I thought man this is going to be a great read. It felt like 30 years reading this book to get to the end. I am sorry, I was just not connecting with any particular character accept for hearing from the victim herself, as to what she seen happening those 30 some years ago when they were all drinking and partying at their campground.

Thank you Netgalley and Random House Publishing for the aARC in exchange for an honest review.

It took a while for me to get into this one, but once I got into it, it took me right along to the end. I came to really enjoy DCI Jonah Sheens and all the constables in the team, and would read more with them spearheading things. The back and forth in time with the group of teenagers now grown was reminiscent of other books that have you examining past friendships and how a single choice can change the course of one’s life. I see some bad reviews, but I thought it a decent enough read, especially if you love a mystery and love getting close to detective teams so you can look forward to other books with the same team.

Book one (assuming?) in a new detective series set outside London. Great characters, pace, descriptions---the book kept me reading and even now, after finishing, wondering what will come next. Will definitely read if this becomes a series. Started a little slow, but hooked right in after the first few chapters. Well done!

On a scorching July night in 1983, a group of teenagers goes camping in the forest. Bright and brilliant, they are destined for great things, and the youngest of the group—Aurora Jackson—is delighted to be allowed to tag along. The evening starts like any other—they drink, they dance, they fight, they kiss. Some of them slip off into the woods in pairs, others are left jealous and heartbroken. But by morning, Aurora has disappeared. Her friends claim that she was safe the last time they saw her, right before she went to sleep. An exhaustive investigation is launched, but no trace of the teenager is ever found.

Thirty years later, Aurora’s body is unearthed in a hideaway that only the six friends knew about, and Jonah Sheens is put in charge of solving the long-cold case. Back in 1983, as a young cop in their small town, he had known the teenagers—including Aurora—personally, even before taking part in the search. Now he’s determined to finally get to the truth of what happened that night. Sheens’s investigation brings the members of the camping party back to the forest, where they will be confronted once again with the events that left one of them dead, and all of them profoundly changed forever.

This searing, psychologically captivating novel marks the arrival of a dazzling new talent, and the start of a new series featuring Detective Chief Inspector Jonah Sheens.

Advance praise for She Lies in Wait

“The mystery intrigues and twists, offering enough red herrings and moments of police procedural to please fans of the genre.”—Kirkus Reviews(starred review)

“Neatly plotted and nicely atmospheric . . . This British import is plausible and eminently satisfying. Encore, please.”— Booklist

“A dark, deep, terrific thriller and a scorching portrait of friendship and its betrayal.”—Nicci French, author of Day of the Dead

“A superior crime book . . . I loved it.”—Marian Keyes, author of The Break

“She Lies in Wait delivers on just about every level—a killer premise, an absorbing plot that twists and turns at just the right pace, and a lead detective who has hit the page fully formed and instantly likeable. One to watch!”—Caz Frear, author of Sweet Little Lies (less) ******Goodreads.com