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“There’s one thing I dislike more than being hurt, it’s being seen to be hurt.”

Author: Ruth Ware

Nora was never the same after her breakup with James. They were teens then – barely out of childhood. Now, ten years later, at twenty-six, Nora remains reclusive and broken. She has shut out everyone from that time of her life. She refuses to speak about it. She knows she should get over it, but what really happened was altogether too painful. Time can’t heal all wounds.

It’s surprising then when Nora gets an email from her childhood best friend, Clare. Clare is getting married and wants to reconnect by having Nora attend her remote bachelorette weekend. Uncharacteristically, Nora says yes. And that’s when everything starts to go wrong.

Stranded in an ultra-modern glass house far out in the woods, the tension mounts as this hen-do turns deadly. The strangers who are corralled together for this celebration are more enemies than friends, and as the wine flows, so too do the jabs, the sinister secrets slowly escaping. And then the ultimate betrayal: Clare is marrying James, the man who broke Nora’s heart and destroyed her.

That’s before the creaking doors in the night, the footsteps downstairs, and the shotgun blast that changed everything. Now, Nora is in the hospital fighting to remember what happened on that fateful night, trying to guess who is dead, and trying to understand why the police think that she is a killer.

While it’s all improbable, In a Dark, Dark Wood is far too delicious. From the beginning, the atmosphere is on point and captivating. I don’t usually fall for stories with unlikable narrators, but this time the tension and hostility worked. It evoked something altogether too real, leaving us questioning early on; what’s this little party really about, and why does Clare suddenly want Nora in her life? Is it for reconciliation or is it to hurt her more? Whatever the reason – it does not come from a good place.

Image by Free Fun Art from Pixabay

Along for the ride, we have a bitchy cast of characters who play the social game, all while letting their animosity and history drip through the widening cracks in their friendly facades. Clare is the perfect girl, the star of the show, the one everyone wants. Nina, a mutual friend of both Clare and Nora, is abrasive and mean, escalating incidents and saying what shouldn’t be said, just to stir the pot. She’s sympathetic with Nora, to a point, but her darker, instigator nature bleeds through. Tom, the only man at the party, is a gay playwright with an agenda and a potential connection to Clare’s fiancé that went bad; he also might have been her fiancé’s boyfriend at some point. Melanie is a young mother and more interested in how her baby boy is doing at home than in getting drunk with strangers and playing cruel games. And then there is Flo, Clare’s best friend, who dresses like her, walks like her, talks like her, and is hiding her instability behind these eerie imitations. It’s obvious from the first, awkward meeting in this pristine, isolated house that this bachelorette party, with its drinking games and hijinks, is a gathering of ominous forces. This party isn’t for fun, and it doesn’t make sense how the popular, pretty Clare has so few friends at the event – or why she has chosen these misanthropic individuals for her celebration of marriage.

We oscillate back and forth in time, between Nora, bruised, brutalized, lying in a hospital bed and fighting through the pain to guess what happened, back to the building tension of the chronological events of the hen party weekend. This leaves each chapter breathless, and as we watch the police interrogate Nora, we feel her own fear. What if she did do something? What if she did loose it and kill somebody? Was it Clare? Was it Nina? What happened, and was she really responsible?

The story paces itself well, starting out with the slow build atmosphere of awkward conversation and wine drenched games, then it escalates the action until we get the gunshot, the blood, the death, and, of course, the twist.

It’s a clever twist too. All will be revealed and while, as I said, Nora’s ongoing inability to recover from her teenage relationship is completely inexplicable for a thirty-year-old woman, especially because she claims that the most emotionally gut-wrenching part of the entire thing didn’t actually bother her, we don’t care, because we’re in the story. It’s good. It’s juicy. It’s dark. It’s Gillian Flynn-like, and so we glance over that little bit and are altogether in for the ride. We don’t know if Nora did it. Was she framed? Was there someone else there? We know enough to tell that whatever happened was complicated and strange. Something was planned, but did the plan go wrong and Nora flipped out or were there even darker reasons for the ending?

We get all these answers, as well as a breathless escape and confrontation sequence, and it is so satisfying. I left the other books I was reading forgotten, victims to my snoozing cats, and sat, reading chapter after chapter, unable to put this down. In a Dark, Dark Wood is that moody winter thriller you’ve been waiting for, and it has everything from twists and turns to shocking revelations to that perfect, ominous yet oddly cozy atmosphere. Highly recommended.

– Frances Carden

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Frances Carden
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