(Reading time: 2 minutes)
Midsummer, the Dorset coast
In the shadows of an ancient wood, guests gather for the opening weekend of The Manor: a beautiful new countryside retreat.
But under the burning midsummer sun, darkness stirs. Old friends and enemies circulate among the guests. And the candles have barely been lit for a solstice supper when the body is found.
It all began with a secret, fifteen years ago. Now the past has crashed the party. And it’ll end in murder at… desire, and the fantastic and terrible power of the imagination.
CW: Murder, rape, death, toxic friendship, sexual assault, drug use, animal death
Rating ⭐️⭐️⭐️
Review
This book wasn’t the best I read, nor the worst. Nevertheless, the thought of DNFing was there at some point, but the fact that Lucy Foley’s books are quick and easy to read helped to finish it.
The story is told with multiple povs, which makes it interesting even if only two of them are helpful in understanding the whole story and makes the other ones drag the book a little. A lot of the story is told rather than shown, which helps to understand what happened, but those chapters were too short, and as the secret occurred fifteen years before the start of this story, it’s sometimes hard to do the time jump every two or three chapters.
The biggest problem was that everything happened in the book’s second half. The first part is mostly here to show the characters and give some elements, even if some of them are distorted. The issue is that with how the book is constructed, if we have too many elements, it would be too predictable, making the plot twist less worthy. Even if it is kind of already the case because, you quickly understand who is the culprit even if you don’t quite know how she hasn’t been charged with it.
The supernatural element with the birds wasn’t worth it, and it was sometimes a mechanism to explain something that didn’t really make sense at first. It would have been more interesting if it wasn’t there or, on the contrary, more present to create a more anxious atmosphere.
The ending after all the revelation was at the same time heartwarming and just okay, and we also have a last revelation that makes the reading worth it (even if it’s a little predictable).
Overall, in this book, the problem is for every good thing, there is something meh.
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