Mystery novelist Leonora Shaw lives a solitary but comfortable life in London. One day while checking her email she finds an invitation to a hen weekend for Clare Cavendish, a friend from childhood whom she hasn't spoken to or seen for ten years. After some urging by a mutual friend, Nora reluctantly agrees to go and finds herself at a mysterious house with a group of near-strangers, deep in the forest far from the city. Quickly, old rivalries and new relationships bubble to the surface and the weekend turns violent, leaving Nora battered and bruised in a hospital bed. As she struggles to reconstruct the sequence of events that brought her there, secrets emerge about her past and her present that force her to question everything she knows about herself and everyone she has ever loved.
While I was aware of what a hendo, or hen weekend, is before reading the book, it probably would have been helpful to American readers to have this British term defined in the beginning of the story. You basically know from the start that inviting your fiancé's ex-girlfriend to your hendo will not have a good outcome. However, the advertisement of this book as a psychological thriller falls short. It just wasn't suspenseful and during the first half of the book there were a few boring sequences. I was not engaged until the latter third of the plot.
The assumed wooded setting, taken from the title, is not the true setting. Most of the events take place in a house owned by a relative of one of the characters. While the house is located in the woods, all of the action takes place inside. The plot is revealed through dialogue, both inner and spoken, from the characters. Speaking of the characters, only one was interesting to me and she was a foil for the main characters. All in all, this was an OK book, nothing to write home about.
3 out of 5 stars.
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