Thanks to Random House Ballentine and Netgalley for this advanced copy!

I love a good locked room mystery and this one was a fun read. We find Emily Fischer in a coffee shop in Los Angeles when she spots Vanessa or is it her doppelgänger who vanished without a trace twenty years ago, and she may just be the last person to see her alive. She invites the same group of friends to a similar get together on a remote winery on the Oregon coast.

I enjoyed the premise of the story, and I really enjoy locked room mysteries, where I tried to guess who the murderer is. I enjoyed the Hollywood style storytelling and screen writing of the story. Enjoyable and a great weekend read for thriller fans.

Thanks to Random House Ballentine and Netgalley for this advanced copy!

This was an interesting and fun mystery, perfect for a winter weekend snuggled under the blanket. A group of friends reconvene at a vineyard 20 years after a similar get-together where someone goes missing? Dies? No one is really sure. As the story unfolds, we get snippets of the screenplay one of the characters is writing based on the experience. What happened to Vanessa? Is she still alive? Who is "haunting" them?

I wish the author had done more to distinguish the secondary characters in this novel. I got a good sense of the narrator, but everyone else felt like a jumble. And the reveal lacked the shock I was hoping for. But its a good mystery and a fun read.

There was not one sympathetic character in this book. Each woman was selfish, conniving, controlling and generally despicable. Each working for her own means and goals irrespective of true individual or collective harm that she was creating. Nothing worked for me, not the characters, nor the format, nor the plot. It was a total miss.

I do appreciate the copy from Random House - Ballantine and NetGalley for a copy.

Thank you to the publisher and NetGalley for an advanced reader copy of this book!

The premise of the book was interesting as a modern ghost story with some hauntings, without the cliches of old Victorian settings and black lace and taffeta. That said, I found the characters to be written a little flat, a little forgetful. I didn’t necessarily care about what happened to them, I felt like there was an emotional tie to them that was missing to keep me wanting to know more of and about them.

Five old friends from college, one disappears and is presumed dead 15 years earlier, the other four gather to “find closure” and follow through with their own agendas, most of which we don’t know about when the book begins. This is a very common genre of books at the moment, so the writing has to be superb, or there has to be a fun twist on the common tropes, or the characters have to be deliciously likable (or unlikable). This book has none of that.

I don’t understand why these girls were friends in the first place, since most of them are bitchy and mean to each other, both in the past and the present. And the only one who might have a chance is spineless and really bad at sneaking around to find answers.

I hate to say a book isn’t unique. But it’s not, and the only thing that makes it stand apart from others for me is the fact that the only character I liked was the grandfather that I wasn’t supposed to.

Thanks to netgalley for this ARC.

Fifteen years ago, five friends, Vanessa, Emily, Brittany, Paige, and Lydia, spent a weekend at Brittany’s family’s winery on the Oregon coast. After a wine infused evening, Vanessa disappeared. Emily always wondered if she had something to do with that disappearance. When she thinks she sees Vanessa at a local coffee shop, she calls together the other three women for a weekend reunion at the winery to try to figure out just what happened.

This book kept my interest throughout the story but it really I picked up the last 20% of the book. Worth a read.

Scenes of the Crime was so good Jilly Gagnon is such a good writer! Great story, fantastic writing and this book was so fun!

Loved it. 5 girlfriends go on a trip to a remote winery in Oregon. One of them disappears. Years later, one of the girlfriends wants to write the story of her disappearance but must find out what really happened. She invites the 3 remaining girls to join her at the winery and recreate the scenes of the crime!

The perfect vacation with friends goes wrong, very wrong. I was immersed in this story constantly trying to guess whodunnit! This was a great mystery.
Thank you #bantam and #NetGalley for an advanced copy in exchange for an honest review

I loved the interesting plot that Gagnon provided in this novel!! A recreation of a trip to solve a murder/disappearance? Where do I sign up?!?!

I thoroughly enjoyed the twists and turns this novel took me on. I also really enjoyed the flashbacks to the past as well as glimpses of the screenwriting that Emily was doing throughout b

Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for providing me with an advanced copy of Scenes of the Crime by Jilly Gagnon.

This story was interesting and I enjoyed the style of some scenes written like a script. However, I feel like the story was lackluster as were the characters.

ARC provided in exchange for an honest review.

This book gave me hope with its complex storytelling and friendships that are struggling in the face of a friend that went missing more than a decade before. The part that really confused and irritated me at times is how most of it is set up as a screenplay since the main character that is telling the story is also a sitcom writer that wants to elevate her career. So most of it is hard to tell if it happened in real life or something she’s writing about for her show. Other than that I really liked all the misdirection and surprises that come up throughout regarding her friend’s disappearance. I would recommend to anyone that likes mysteries and friends coming together to try to solve them.

Sometimes books take a bit to get into. This one drug out until almost the end before it got engrossing. This book had a very promising premise. A group of girlfriends get together again on a girl’s trip to get some closure on the disappearance of their friend years ago. This was a let down for me personally.

I loved this author's first book so I was excited to start this one. It's a story of a group of girls going a way for the weekend, one going missing. Now, years later, they return to the same spot to discuss what they think happened to their friend and to try to rekindle their friendships.

I wish I'd loved this one. I think there are a lot of books with this same plot and I'm, maybe, burned out. I struggled to like any of the characters. I found the reasonings and excuses to be a big stretch and really struggled to connect the dots in a way that made sense.

If you like mysteries with remote locations and toxic female relationships, you should give this one a try. I just didn't find a way to connect with it.

A huge thank you to the author and publisher for providing an e-ARC via Netgalley. This does not affect my opinion regarding the book.

📕How much of “doing everything for your friend” is too much? At what level it becomes a selfish act instead of helping out a friend out of tough situation? 15 years after such action, we are trying to see if it is possible to answer these questions
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📗Friend groups should never have odd number of friends. It would mean that one is always alpha and rest is always split into too. The other problem is two people might think that they are alphas. These cousins in this crime scene were those alphas. One of them wanted to be the alpha for sure, the other one just want to feel support of her cousin
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📘With everyone having secrets and wishes, it is easy to manipulate anyone and everyone into believe in a lie. Will you be able to pick these lies? Will you figure out in whose favor those lie work?

This book took me longer to get into than I thought it would. But once I got started I couldn't put it down. I enjoyed this read and would recommend to a friend!

I was so conflicted as I was reading this story. I thought that the author's format of how she chose to solve the mystery of a girl who went missing 15 years prior was really unique, but the problem was that I personally didn't like it. Gagnon went from present, to past, to script, as she was she had Emily tell the story and "solve" the mystery of what happened to their "dear" friend 15 years prior. At Emily's request, she and the other girls, Paige, Lydia, and Brittany all to go to the last place they all had been together to try to figure it all out what happened to Vanessa. At the start of the book, one of the girls said they were all really there because of their secrets and she had to make sure that hers was kept safe, so I knew right away that perhaps at least one of them was possibly culpable in some way for Vanessa's disappearance, and my first real suspect was the one character due to her saying that about her secret.

I am very character-driven when reading a book and these characters did not resonate with me at all. I felt no real empathy for any of them, their relationships were pretty toxic, and they actually weren't even friends to begin with. So I just had a very difficult time buying into the entire story and the girls' various renditions of what happened that night. Emily is totally just trying to make sense of Vanessa's disappearance so she can get a Hollywood type script/movie so she tries different scenarios and sometimes I found there to be plot holes (or maybe just my confusion). So that decreased my pleasure in the book. Plus, I don't know if what was "discovered" and supposedly happened was the truth/reality or something in Emily's head.

I found this book to be very interesting and intriguing. I would recommend this a friend because this is a book for everyone. I really enjoyed emerging myself into this book and it was just wonderful.

I hate nothing more than giving a review that isn't good. What I always think to myself is that just because this one wasn't for me doesn't mean it won't be for someone. I like to give a book a chance, there have been a few times that I have been surprised. For me, this wasn't one of those times.

The book centers around 5 friends who spent a weekend at one of the family's winery's on the Oregon coast. After they have had a little too much to drink, one of them ends up disappearing. Years later, Emily thinks she sees Vanessa (the one who wound up missing) at a coffee shop and calls the other 3 women for a reunion to try and figure out what happened.

For some reason, this one just didn't work for me.