One of Us Is Dead had those Real Housewives vibes - catty women, money, secrets, drama. I loved how right off the bat we know that someone has been murdered, but we don't know who. From there, the story gives us the inner workings of quite the cast of characters with a grand finale of revealing who didn't make it out alive. And just when you thought you had it all figured out, there are some twists thrown in to keep you on your toes. One of Us Is Dead was a bingeable and entertaining read!

Meet Buckhead, the town where housewives behave at their worst and murder is the special of the day.

The group of women included:

Olivia: she is egocentric and will do anything to be on top. She has waited years to help destroyed Shannon now that she is down on her luck.

Shannon: once the most powerful woman in town, married to Bryce, the rich politician until her marriage falls apart and he leaves her for a younger woman whom he marries.

Crystal: a young woman from Texas and now the wife of Bryce.

Karen: a very successful real state agent. She is married to a successful plastic surgeon and has a small child.

Jenny: the owner of Glow. The IT beauty salon. The place where these women backstab each other, drink champagne and tell their secrets intend it or not.

I had so much fun listening/reading this one. The women were catty, spoiled, and plastic but entertaining nonetheless. The audio narrators Andi Arndt, Hillary Huber, Elizabeth Evans, Brittany Pressley, and Cassandra Campbell did a wonderful job at fleshing out these women for me. I will say Jenny was my favorite since she was the most down-to-earth person in the group. I did root for almost all of them through the book.

After finishing listening to this guilty pleasure, I know I will read Jeneva Rose's next book.

Cliffhanger: No

4/5 Fangs

Complimentary audio and digital copy were provided by Blackstone Publishing via Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.

Buckhead is one of the most prestigious neighborhoods in the country. A group of women are members of an exclusive salon, Glow. Jenny is the owner of Glow and she has sunk her entire life into making the salon successful. She has created a salon where the women all congregate as they prepare for the biggest events in their lives. Shannon is the Queen Bee - until she and her husband divorce. And then her glamourous life is reduced to a rented apartment and being left out of invites. Crystal is the new wife and just wants to be liked, but the excessive wealth makes her uncomfortable. Olivia has been waiting to take Shannon's place as Queen Bee and she will stop at nothing to wear the crown. Karen is happy to be a follower, but lately she has been listless and unfulfilled. One of these women is dead. But who killed her and are the others in danger, too?

One Of Us Is Dead was so good! As the reader, it took me a while to get into the book. Readers don't know who is dead until nearly the end of the book. The book goes back and forth with the timeline. The present, with someone being interviewed by the police, and the past as the events leading to the death are unfolding. I had a hard time getting into the story, because all I could think of for the first few chapters was that these women are just horrible human beings. And I wasn't entirely wrong, but not everybody is as they appear. - CLICK HERE FOR SPOILERS.


Bottom Line - One of Us Is Dead had so many twists and turns, I didn't know what was going to happen next. And those are really the best kind of books!
Details:

One Of Us Is Dead by Jeneva Rose
On Instagram
Pages: 318
Publisher: Blackstone Publishing
Publication Date: 4.26.2022
Buy it Here!
Thank you to NetGalley!

I won’t say much because I don’t want to give anything away but the villain is excellent and the plot is fun and fast past. Run don’t walk to get this. While this isn’t my usual style of book I was entertained for the entire time. Once again a delightfully villainous villain.

I LOVED THIS!
such a fun and entertaining twist on the rich housewives drama we see over and over again. The format was enjoyable and i loved the different narratives we got. The plot was fun and interesting and the suburban town setting was cleverly written. I loved the twists and turns and really couldn't predict how things were going to go. Really enjoyed this one and would recommend to anyone a fan of desperate housewives

In One of Us is Dead, we meet several women who live in Buckhead (a very exclusive, fancy area of Atlanta). Each woman has goals, dreams, and issues…and none will let each other stand in her way. You have a divorcee, a new wife, a woman who wants to be queen of the neighborhood, and the hairstylist who owns the exclusive salon they love to gather at.

Rich people behaving badly is a set-up for a thriller that I rarely get tired of. This book was entertaining, enthralling, and I couldn’t put it down. These characters are people that we normally love to hate (with the exception of Jenny, the hairstylist and salon owner), and they were all so well-written. I was beyond impressed with Rose’s writing skills in this book.

I’m so excited already for Jeneva Rose’s next book!

Fun Fun Fun. this book is a wonderful respite from some of the heavy mysteries that I have read recently. It is the story of 6 women told from each of their perspectives in a crazy, backstabbing bitchy romp. I loved every page.
and look forward to the next book this talented writer comes out with.

The real housewives gone real bad in a hurry here. The very rich acting very badly and finally getting their comeuppance. Super fast paced read, full of chaos and mystery.

This was fun!

A light, interesting thriller, rich-people-problems trope, and most of it set at an exclusive high end beauty salon. Whenever you are in the mood for a juicy, gossipy, dramatic, The Real Housewives style but add murder type of book, this is your gem.

This is one of the best thrillers I had read plus it is mixed with Real Housewives cattiness!!! I am now a huge Jeneva Rose fan! 🙌🏻😍🙌🏻

The characters were all messed up in their own way so you are led to not like any of them! The salon was the main setting for all the gossip so I had to know what was going to happen next! I couldn’t put this one down!

Jeneva’s writing was raw, blunt and so funny! Enjoyed this one so much!

If you love thrillers- 🏃🏻‍♀️run to your local bookstore or library to pick this one up! 😉❤️Highly recommend!

A big thank you to @netgalley and Blackstone Publishing for my advanced readers copy!

This is a DNF for me. I don't know what it is about this book, but it's not grabbing my attention and when it does, I don't find myself lovin' the storyline. I've been a fan of Rose's for a while so I am hoping this was just a miss and that future books will be a better fit for my reading style.

Juicy and Melodramatic

One of Us is dead by Jeneva Rose is about the lives of some desperate housewives who would to any lengths for keeping their secrets and maintaining their high class status. So what happens when one of them turns out dead.

This book was a pleasure read, it was so juicy with all the drama going on in the lives of these ladies, backstabbing and lies to protect your deep secret that overall I felt it to be very entertaining. I liked how the author has kept the killer and victims identity a mystery throughout the read and that gave the readers a chance to overthink.

Overall a good thriller with a lot of drama.

Thank you @blackstonepublishing @netgalley @jenevaroseauthor for the arc of this amazing book in exchange of a honest review.

If you liked "the Hunting Wives" you will LOVE "One of Us is Dead". Rich women, domestic suspense, murder, thrills and twists and turns. This is an excellent read.

Part of BookSparks’ #SPRC2022, this one had me on the edge of my seat throughout. Murder mystery meets The Real Housewives—with dual timelines and multiple POVs, the way Jeneva wrote this made me feel like I was experiencing a movie. I mostly listened to this on audiobook thanks to Net Galley and Blackstone Publishing and would highly recommend it because of the amazing narrators—it truly gave me a full experience!! Ty for my gifted copies💗

<i>One of Us Is Dead</i> pairs a great concept with an even better setting-- a beauty salon, and all the gossip shared within. But the execution left much to be desired. Author Jeneva Rose often makes fun, quippy, snarky remarks, but they would've worked far better with an omniscient, 3rd person narrator. The choice of first person-- especially in the case of Olivia-- didn't work at all for me. Unless I didn't understand the tone and this was supposed to be satire, the characters were unrealistically self aware as they described the events and their thoughts. A few examples:

<quote>"I placed my hand against my chest and made my face sympathetic. It was my least favorite facial expression."

"I nearly forgot about that because it didn't affect me in the slightest."

"The skin heals perfectly, and I should know. Mine's been cut into a dozen times and look at me, I'm stunning." </quote>

See what I mean?

As a thriller connoisseur who has recently moved on to literary fiction, I decided to gamble with a new thriller that peaked my interests. While the "desperate housewives" type of thrillers are often one note, there are some like "The Hunting Wives" that use tropes to the writers advantage and breathe new life into this saucy subgenre. Unfortunately, the same cannot be said for Jeneva Rose's "One of Us Is Dead."

The novel tells the story of a group of upper class women from Buckhead, a town which is described as "a place of expensive cars, huge houses, and competitive friendships." The women are often at each other's throats, with their leader, Olivia, being the most competitive and snide of the bunch. Once a new woman Crystal comes to town - the new wife of Shannon's cheating ex-husband - things begin to unravel quickly within not just the group, but Buckhead as a whole.

While "One of Us Is Dead," is fun, it offers nothing new to the thriller genre. It's the kind of fun that you get from watching reality tv, stuffing your face with popcorn or chips waiting in anticipation to see what happens next, until you're left craving more after the show's already over. I never got what I was looking for with this novel, but I do appreciated the sapphic affair that was sprinkled in.

I absolutely loved this book! This will absolutely go down as one of my favorite modern thriller-mystery-suspense novels.

The plot was well crafted, the characters were fascinating and the whodunnit reveal left me utterly speechless. This was one of those books that you just didn’t want to end. I couldn’t get enough of the friend dynamic of the elite and wealthy ladies of Buckhead. In a Real Housewives meets murder mystery, I can’t recommend this book enough!

Thank you so much to Netgalley and Blackstone Publishing for this gifted eARC!

The Review

This is one of the best thrillers I’ve read so far this year. The dialogue and multiple POVs of this read have driven forward a mystery that feels both authentic and surprising all at once. The ways in which these women interact with one another, and the choice to focus solely on the women’s POV and leave the male characters as wildcards was an inspired and satisfying choice for the story. Getting the chance to see the shocking twists and turns not only in the story, but in the shocking bonds these characters form with one another was such a great hook for readers to get invested in the narrative.

Honestly, this is one of the first books in years in which I was totally surprised by the book’s ending. I love stories like this that make me guess the killer’s identity early on, only to change my opinion several times over the course of the narrative. I had thought I’d figured out the twist until the final few pages when everything flipped on top of its head. What helped this mystery was the identity of the victim, which was kept hidden until the final few chapters of the book. Not knowing this kept the motivations and agendas presented from each of these characters’ POVs so captivating that the real identity of both victim and killer will leave readers reeling.

The Verdict

Haunting, entertaining, and yet charming in its writing and delivery, author Jeneva Rose’s “One of Us Is Dead” is a must-read novel of 2022, and one of my top picks for the best thriller of 2022. The descriptive nature of the author’s writing style really painted an image of these characters and this small-town setting to life perfectly, and the twists and turns will keep readers hanging off of the author’s every word.

You know what they say, the lower the hair the closer to the devil you are…because oh my gosh these women were so insanely cut throat!! 🤯 🔪 This was juicier than juicy juice. I saw this book as an ode to Big Little Lies and The Hunting Wives. Just add some champagne and voluminous shampoo to the mixture. What I liked was how each woman’s perspective was equally entertaining, and with 5 alternating viewpoints that’s impressive to keep changing up. This is a not a book where you will adore the characters but you definitely won’t forget them.

“𝘚𝘩𝘦 𝘸𝘢𝘴 𝘢 𝘧𝘰𝘳𝘨𝘪𝘷𝘦-𝘢𝘯𝘥-𝘧𝘰𝘳𝘨𝘦𝘵 𝘬𝘪𝘯𝘥 𝘰𝘧 𝘱𝘦𝘳𝘴𝘰𝘯. 𝘐, 𝘰𝘯 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘰𝘵𝘩𝘦𝘳 𝘩𝘢𝘯𝘥, 𝘢𝘭𝘸𝘢𝘺𝘴 𝘣𝘦𝘭𝘪𝘦𝘷𝘦𝘥 𝘵𝘩𝘦𝘳𝘦 𝘸𝘢𝘴 𝘢𝘯𝘰𝘵𝘩𝘦𝘳 𝘰𝘱𝘵𝘪𝘰𝘯 𝘰𝘯 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘵𝘢𝘣𝘭𝘦. 𝘍𝘰𝘳𝘨𝘪𝘷𝘦, 𝘧𝘰𝘳𝘨𝘦𝘵, 𝘰𝘳 𝘧𝘶𝘤𝘬𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘯𝘦𝘷𝘦𝘳 𝘭𝘦𝘵 𝘪𝘵 𝘨𝘰.”

𝗢𝗡𝗘 𝗢𝗙 𝗨𝗦 𝗜𝗦 𝗗𝗘𝗔𝗗 is like a season of 𝘛𝘩𝘦 𝘙𝘦𝘢𝘭 𝘏𝘰𝘶𝘴𝘦𝘸𝘪𝘷𝘦𝘴 where one of the main cast gets murdered and everyone is a suspect. Jeneva Rose nails the snarkiness, entitlement and bitchiness that characterizes a certain kind of powerful, privileged and pampered woman, and I found myself laughing out loud at the characters' outrageous behavior more than once. Each one has a walk-in closetful of juicy secrets which keeps you guessing who gets killed and who does the killing.

I alternated between the physical book and the audiobook. The narrators were terrific and really brought these over-the-top women to life.

If you're looking for a delicious, salacious, binge-worthy read, look no further. These Queen Bs give a whole new meaning to (literal) backstabbing!

Thanks to Blackstone Publishing and NetGalley for the copies to review.