To celebrate their friend's marriage, six women embark on a trip to a not-yet-open luxury health retreat for a relaxing, mindful look weekend. Their phones are taken at the door to encourage a fully unplugged experience and although the women may not have seen each other in quite some time, the trip is going nicely. What these women do not know is that one of them has come with the motive of investigating a decade-old murder that may put all of them at risk.

The Bachelorette Party is a story you have probably read before. A bunch of women agree to go on a private retreat where something spooky happened once and, lo and behold, the spook is back with a vengeance. The thing that made me give this book such a low rating, though, is that the author takes this tried and true formula and proceeds to do nothing interesting with it.

First of all, the book starts out very slow. I can take a slow burn, but waiting until nearly 60% for something interesting to happen goes way past the "slow burn" threshold - that's just bad pacing. There is a smaller sub-mystery that strings the reader along for that time, but the payout is just too weak to really be engaging enough to warrant that kind of page space.

There's a lot of danger floating above the characters in this book which would be effective if I felt any sort of attachment to them. Every character is so flat, though, that it was really hard for me to care about the fate of any of them. Any woman that wasn't Tessa (our leading lady) or Irene the yoga teacher faded into the background for me in a muddy swirl. Even Annalise, who was the bride being celebrated, felt like an afterthought at her own party. The other women, whose names I'm even having a hard time remembering, had very few defining characteristics at all and completely merged into each other. Natalie and Liane and Caroline and Mikayla could all have been the same person. I wouldn't know any better (except that one was super annoying about her kids).

Frankly, I wasn't a huge fan of this author's first work, The Lost Village and I probably should not have agreed to review this one. At least in TLV though there was a maybe-paranormal-maybe-not mystery standing behind the characters to make the plot interesting. Although I found the writing amateurish, I did find the core of the story interesting. This book, though, read like a stripped down version of every other locked-room mystery I've ever read. I know I personally called the killer from a mile off which, while not a cardinal sin, definitely left a damper at the end of the book when there was no twist to twist - just a lukewarm confirmation of what was pretty obviously hinted at the whole time.

As far as audiobook-specific feedback, I felt this title was just 'fine'. The narrator had no specific vocal changes from character to character, which made them hard to distinguish from each other. The characters were already fairly flat, so I think some type of change might have been useful here. The delivery felt mostly flat without a lot of dramatic reading, and the tone at times felt inappropriately light or unbothered for the weight of the moment. I wouldn't say that this was a bad audiobook - just that it was mostly forgettable in terms of performance.

A bachelorette party in a not yet open hotel on an isolated island, an island where 4 friends might have been before they disappeared 10 years earlier, just screams trouble and trouble definitely abounds. With a limited cast of characters and an essentially locked room it isn’t too hard to figure who is involved when a dead body is found, but the why and the intertwining of what happened 10 years earlier makes for a bone chilling read with a slasher movie type vibe.

A remote island. Four friends go missing.
Ten years later, that same island. Four friends reunite for a bachelorette party.
Will ghosts start to appear and ruin this “last fling before the ring”, or will these four girls make it our alive?

Traveling between 2012 and 2022, this story centers around the disappearance of four women from an island in the Baltic. We know from the beginning that something very sinister happened to the women, but as no trace of them were ever found, people presume they drowned in a drunken boating accident. In the latter timeline, a podcaster is on the island, which now boasts a luxury hotel. She intends to uncover the truth about the women, no matter what the cost.
The narrator’s voice sounds like a lispy little girl detracts from the story

3.5 stars

Thank you Macmillan Audio, Minotaur Books and NetGalley for the advanced copies of this book, out in June.

This book gave serious White Lotus vibes and I was here for it!

Following a group of gal pals who visit an exclusive and not yet open to the public yoga retreat on a private island where four girls disappeared 10 years earlier, The Bachelorette Party is a bingeable popcorn thriller perfect for summer.

While a little predictable, it kept me hooked and on the edge of my toes right until the very end.

🎧: The narrator did a great job, and kept me captivated throughout the entire story. She really moved the action along in the appropriate places.