The Dead Girls Club by Damien Angelica Walters is a supernatural thriller that has an interesting concept. The book has a dual timeline that does make for some engaging moments in the story. However, the main character is very unrelatable as an adult.

What is really intriguing about this novel is the idea of a children’s game gone wrong. Heather and her friends have taken the stories too far and now one of the girls is dead. This aspect of the story is both terrifying and engaging to read about. I found myself wanting to know more about the Red Lady and what it all means.

❀ COMING OF AGE STORY

There is something about a book set in the ’90s that always seems to draw me in. It is really enjoyable to read Heather’s perspective as a preteen. She is coming of age at this point in the novel and is going through some tough times with her friends. This aspect of the story is really enjoyable.

❀ UNRELATABLE ADULT MAIN CHARACTER

That being said, Heather as an adult is not a likeable character. It is quite difficult to relate to her and her behaviour is really annoying. The way she treats her husband is over the top and I would have liked to see this relationship more balanced.

The Dead Girls Club is an interesting idea for a novel. Reading about being a young girl in the ’90s is a fun step back in time. However, the present day parts of the book didn’t sit well with me.

Thank you Netgalley and Crooked Lane Books for the chance to read The dead girls club by Damien Angelica Walters. In 1991, Heather Cole and her friends were members of the Dead Girls Club. The girls exchanged stories about serial killers and imaginary monsters, like the Red Lady, the spirit of a vengeful witch killed centuries before. Heather knew it was just a story, until her best friend Becca began insisting the Red Lady was real....and then Becca was killed because of her belief.... by her friend Heather. Now thirty years later Heather receives a necklace in the mail; a necklace from thirty years ago...someone knows what happened all those years ago. This was an ok read for me. It didnt keep my attention and I didnt really like the characters. Some readers will enjoy the book especially those who grew up on Goosebumps.

When Heather Cole was a young girl, her and her friends were part of a secret club called The Dead Girls Club. Obsessed with serial killers and urban legends, the girls would tell stories about murders and imaginary monsters. One of these monsters was the Red Lady, a vengeful spirit of a witch who was killed centuries before. Heather knew that this was just a story, but her best friend Becca is convinced the Red Lady is real and is willing to do anything to make her appear. Even if that means dying.

It's been thirty years since that dreadful night, and Heather has tried everything in her power to forget what happened to Becca. Until she starts receiving strange phone calls and Becca's half of their Best Friends Forever necklace. The necklace Becca was wearing when she died. Desperate to leave that part of her past buried, Heather spirals into paranoia and whoever is targeting her won't stop until she pays for what she did.

Based off the synopsis of this, I was expecting a chilling unsettling read, but I was left feeling disappointed. I didn't feel fully invested at all through this. I didn't love Heather as a character, there was just nothing I connected with. Her reactions to things were so over the top and unrealistic, I had a hard time believing what was going on. The glimpses into that summer when the girls were younger were alright, but it mostly turned into the little catty fights they had. I also didn't love how there were unnecessary details occasionally, such as shopping purchases or the color of her toenails. It didn't add anything to the story, so I just didn't feel like it needed to be there. I also didn't feel much resolve at the end, it actually left me with more questions. Overall, this just wasn't for me.

To be perfectly honest, I wanted to read this book because of that beautiful cover. I think I requested a copy on NetGalley without even really reading the synopsis. Unfortunately, the cover ended up being the best thing about the book.

I kind of feel like the synopsis is a little misleading. It doesn’t say anything inaccurate, but I think it frames the story as more of a Horror than it actually was. Instead of a creepy, cat-and-mouse type of story, we get to watch a paranoid woman wander around making stupid decision after stupid decision, interspersed with the re-telling of the events that led to her childhood best friend’s death. The past chapters were a bit of a struggle to get through. The Red Lady is a story Becca makes up and scares her friends with. Many of the chapters were just repetitive stories of the Red Lady and how Heather gets annoyed that Becca doesn’t want to talk about anything else. Eventually all the girls start to think she’s real and it ends in some insanity. The girls are 12 or 13 and I felt like they were too old for this type of behavior. I also thought Becca was a little psycho and I had a hard time understanding why Heather would actually want to be friends with her.

I had a real hard time liking Heather. I just feel like every single thing she did was the wrong thing. As a psychologist I thought she should have recognized her unhealthy behavior a little more than she did. But, I guess it goes along with the cliche that the people who need psychologists the most are the ones that end up going into that field. She also really frustrated me with how she treated her husband and her friends.

One good thing I have to say about the story, though, is that I thought the conclusion was going to be super obvious and it ended up not being what I thought it would be. I was so focused on what I thought was going to happen, that I overlooked all the clues the author left and I liked that it surprised me. I just wish the rest of the story wasn’t so repetitive and slow.

Overall, The Dead Girls Club wasn’t really for me. I found the main character really unlikable and felt the story dragged a lot. It didn’t live up to it’s potential for me, but I have seen some more favorable reviews of it, so it might still be worth the read for some. I’m increasing my rating a bit because the end did manage to have a twist I wasn’t expecting.

Overall Rating (out of 5): 2.5 Stars

Silly me: I started this one late in the day before we had a houseful of guests hungry for turkey and all the trimmings. That day, I tossed the 20+ pound bird in the oven around 10 a.m., and coupled with other "stuff" I'd made and the mountain of goodies trucked in by family and friends, it was a big hit. That made me happy, of course, but in the back of my mind I kept hoping everyone would find their way to the door before nightfall, leaving me a couple of hours to get back to reading.

That's because within the first quarter or so of the book, I was hooked. Chapters shift from present day to 1991, when four young friends - Heather, Gia, Becca and Rachel - formed what they called the Dead Girls Club because they loved to read and talk about all things macabre. Becca in particular was quite talented when it came to making up stories that sounded totally real; her best (or worst, depending on your belief in the occult) was about a centuries-old wicked witch called the Red Lady. Becca's took her determination to prove that the Red Lady was more than a figment of her imagination to extreme lengths - alienating her friends and culminating in her death (not insignificantly, by Heather's hand). Heather, of course, never admitted what she'd done, Becca's body was never found and ultimately another woman convicted of the crime and sent to jail.

Fast-forward to the here and now, when a happily married Heather is a psychologist who helps troubled girls at the Silverstone Center - perhaps a compensation of sorts for her acts some 30 years ago. She's totally lost touch with the other two childhood friends, but when she gets an envelope in the mail that contains a necklace she thought (make that hoped) was gone forever, the past suddenly looms over the present. Heather becomes convinced that someone - one of those childhood friends, perhaps - knows what really happened to Becca and wants to see Heather punished.

Other clues that someone wants to "out" Heather start to appear, and that's when I started to become less enchanted with her. I've never cared for extreme paranoia, especially in female characters; and while Heather's concerns are for the most part understandable under the circumstances, she does, to put it mildly, start to over-think what happens every single minute of every single day. But she doesn't stop there; instead, she goes to extreme lengths to find out who's behind it all, doubting anybody and everybody in the process, including her loving husband.

Bit by bit, the truth begins to emerge, with everything coming together near the end as a few surprises are revealed. I'm not sure how happy I was at the conclusion of Heather's journey, but I'll certainly say it was for the most part an exciting trip. I thank the publisher, via NetGalley, for the opportunity to read an advance copy.

Bram Stoker nominee Damien Angelica Walters delivers a haunting coming of age tale in The Dead Girls Club. The novel plays one of my more favorite cards, with a ‘Then’ and a ‘Now’ chapter, each one following after the other. This tends to work miracles in pace of reading, because often times, you just want to get back to each storyline. The Dead Girls Club definitely keeps your interest piqued. In the ‘Then’ sections we follow a club of four middle school aged girls who like to talk about dead girls, serial killers, murders and the like.

It’s a strange fascination to be sure, but one that is believable. I found myself nodding to many of the issues they talked about, because it’s not just all about dead things. With the topics of conversation flowing smoothly and as discombobulated as any young pre-teen girls thoughts would be, the focus of the novel is mostly on best-friends Heather and Becca. It’s clear Heather has the home life advantage; it’s stable and loving, while Becca’s is the opposite with neglect and even abuse. When Becca starts telling thee story about The Red Lady, it leads to an event, ending club meetings and friendships.

Fast-forward thirty years, and Heather is suddenly haunted by the past. She’s a bit unreliable and makes some mistakes that are a little cliché, but there are also moments when her actions do make sense. It’s easy to empathize with the idea that she would want to hide the terror of her past, and in doing so she would have had to build up a wall to hide that secret. But with that, as is always the lesson, walls can tumble, creating more lies or unearthing the need to build more lies and soon nothing can be kept straight over what is fact and fiction.

As the penultimate ending built, I did find myself awaiting an anti-climatic conclusion. I didn’t like the ending. It felt rushed and also a bit unrealistic, and the clues became less and less hidden and more blatantly obvious, it simply lacked the depth the rest of the novel up to that point had held on to. The Dead Girls Club was a fun read and I’d still recommend it to those who like thrillers with horror elements and a touch of mystery.

My Thoughts
I was super excited to read this book and I was even more excited when I received the ARC from NetGalley! I was looking forward to what I hoped and expected would be a 5-star read! That, however, didn’t end up being the case. Here are my pros and cons for The Dead Girls Club:

Pros

1. This is a weird pro, but I was surprised and impressed with the description of smells in this book. From the smells of dirty feet, sweaty armpits and unbrushed teeth to the aroma of a hundred wet pennies and sour sheets and everything in between. I thought the emphasis on smells was unique and I don’t remember reading anything in recent memory with such an emphasis. It really helped describe the atmosphere.
2. There were some interesting revelations at the very end of the book that I did not anticipate.
3. I was intrigued about finding out who was tormenting Heather with the necklace and other items. Heather’s reactions, clearly unstable at times, were unsettling. However… (see Con #3).
4. I liked the Then and Now aspect of the story, although the Now parts got a tad tedious.
5. The pacing of the novel was pretty good considering its length.

Cons

1. Introducing new characters in the last 10% of the book to resolve a plot point is one of my biggest pet peeves in thriller/horror novels. Just don’t do it.
2. I’m sorry, but I just can’t buy that Heather would kill her friend for any reason (not a spoiler, the synopsis tells you she killed her). Heather simply wasn’t written as the kind of person that would do something like that, at least not as a child. Heather clearly had issues when she was older; however, it presumed that was because of what she did to her friend, not a continuance of some pre-murder mental illness.
3. I felt like adult Heather’s reactions to some of things that were happening were a bit overwritten. She’s a psychologist for heaven’s sake. Shouldn’t she, of all people, understand how to control her own emotions/reactions/actions? At least a little bit?
4. The “Red Lady” wasn’t scary… at least not to me. Plus, this book is hyped as a supernatural thriller. Did I miss the supernatural aspect? I’ll concede to psychological thriller because these girls clearly had/have issues, but supernatural? No.
5. I didn’t really like any of the characters… none of them.
6. I think the novel was a bit overlong.
7. I think the synopsis gives away too much of the plot. Makes the ending just a tad anticlimactic.

Summary

This book had a ton of potential that was never realized. The premise was intriguing and the story started off relatively well, but then it kind of went off the rails in my opinion. Also, I don’t believe this book will be very memorable. I finished this novel 4 days before I wrote this review and I struggled to even remember the story. Thank goodness I keep notes on books I intend to review!

Unfortunately, this book wasn’t thrilling or supernatural. I love thrillers and horror novels, but this particular book just wasn’t my cup of tea. However, if you are interested in the story, I encourage you to read it and form your own opinion. There are a lot of people out there that loved this book… sadly I’m not one of them.

Thank you NetGalley and Crooked Lane Books for a free eARC of this book in exchange for an honest review.

I don’t normally read horror or thriller novels but was drawn to the synopsis. Having never read a novel by this author I wasn’t sure if the character development would stand up to its promise. I didn’t need to worry. This was a superb example of a story far out reaching its genre. I enjoyed it tremendously!

1991 and Baby, Baby is playing on the radio when the life of two best friends start to change.

Heather and Becca are best friends forever. They even buy the half-necklaces to prove it.

Heather is loved and cared for by her family while Becca is having trouble at home. Her mother is drinking and becoming violent.

Heather and Becca have two other friends, Gia and Rachel. The four of them form the Dead Girls Club. They have a love for the macabre. Reading about serial killers is something engrossing for them. Then, Becca begins telling the story of the Red Lady. A witch wrongly accused and murdered. When the girls perform a ritual to bring the Red Lady into their lives, death follows.

Fast forward three decades, and now Heather is a child psychologist. She's married and happy with her life. Then, she receives a package with Becca's necklace. Heather knows someone is behind this but could it be that the Red Lady is involved?

The Dead Girls Club failed to entertain me. I don't know if it was because I couldn't believe the choices the main character was taking. She went off the rails in 2.3 seconds and did a very poor job as a psychologist too. I just couldn't like her or believe her motives.

The ending wasn't rewarding either. It was just not for me.

Cliffhanger: No

2/5 Fangs

A complimentary copy was provided by Crooked Lane Books via Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.

Dead Girls Club by Damien Angelica Walters is a supernatural thriller about four young girls who are involved in the Dead Girls Club. By the end of summer, one girl is dead and the question is how and why. Years later, the locket on the dead girl’s neck is mailed to one of the girls who lived. The story descends into a whirl of guilt, fear, anxiety and nightmares as the mystery finally unfolds and a secret reveals itself. This is an amazing, suspenseful story. Great ending - I enjoyed this book very much. Thank you to Net Galley for allowing me a copy of this book for review.

I really enjoyed a great many things about this book. Characters were fleshed out and the plot was well spaced. Some of the secondary storylines could've used a bit more page space but all in all an enjoyable read!

I love Paul Tremblay's A Head Full of Ghosts, and when I saw the reference to that book in the description of this book, of course I ;had to read it.

HERE'S THE SUMMARY:
In 1991, Heather kills her best friend Becca in a ritual for the Red Lady. (Don't worry - I'm not telling you anything that isn't in the description of the book.) Decades later, Heather receives her best friends locket in the mail. Who else knows what really happened that night and what do they want from her?

HERE'S THE REVIEW:
This book is nothing like Tremblay's Head Full, which is truly a supernatural thriller. This book is a supernatural thriller for the first 2/3 and then turns into your run of the mill, predictable, unbelievable thriller. Of the two story lines here (1991 and present day), the story of the teen girls is the most interesting. And the story of the Red Lady was intriguing, with the girls either experiencing true supernatural horror or a kind of "mass" delusion, which leads to the final ritual. Heather's story line in the present is just plain...boring. (I will admit to lots of skimming in the last half of the book.) Heather quickly becomes unhinged, with many scenes of her tearing at her cuticles, screaming, crying, and suspecting everyone from her husband to her best friend's mom who just got out of prison (after spending decades there for the murder of her daughter, which we know she actually didn't commit). I did not find the ending satisfying, as it lost all of it's supernatural elements - unless I missed them because I was skimming.

I think I would have enjoyed this book more had I not expected something close to A Head Full of Ghosts. Thanks for the opportunity to read it!

I finished "The Dead Girls Club" about a week ago and have been struggling to rate it. In the end, I rate it a 2.5, and on a five-star scale I am rounding it down to 2. "The Dead Girls Club" wasn't a bad book and it wasn't poorly written, it just wasn't one that I enjoyed or find memorable.

As a middle school student, I lived off of books by Christopher Pike and R.L. Stine. The writing style is similar to their books, and dad I read this book as a high school student or in my twenties, I would have given this a higher rating. It reads like a Christopher Pike or R.L. Stine book for an older audience. If you enjoy those two YA authors, and still enjoy them as adults-- then I definitely recommend this book to you!

"The Dead Girls Club" refers to a group of four young girls who get together to tell stories about serial killers and their victims. The story opens with Heather, one of the girls from the club, as she receives a token from her past that forces her to remember the death of her best friend. She slowly becomes paranoid as she thinks her dead friend or one of the other members of the girls club is out to get her. We experience the memories of her past as a member of the club, and her life in the present as she tries to understand why it is all coming back to haunt her.

My main issue with the book is that present tense Heather is completely unlikable and has little character growth throughout the story. I didn't enjoy reading about her or from her perspective in either timelines. I would have probably enjoyed the past with the dead girls club more if I had more than just her perspective. At the same time, since none of the other characters had any character growth either, it mostly fell flat.
I did not find the ending satisfying, although most everything was explained in a way that left few loose ends. I wish I enjoyed this book more than I did, but it wasn't nearly as scary or thrilling as I hoped it would be.

Thank you to Crooked Lane Books and Netgalley for an ARC edition of this book in exchange for my honest opinion.

3 out of 5 stars

Back in 1991 when Heather Cole was twelve her best friend Becca and their two other friends formed a club called The Dead Girls Club, They named their club after the victims of all the serial killers they were obsessed with as kids. At first the club was innocent enough but then things begin to turn darker. Each night during the Summer before junior high they would meet in one of the empty houses that Becca's Mom was trying to sell . When Becca's turn came around she told her friends the story of The Red Lady, a powerful witch. As the Summer wore on the stories Becca told become darker and darker to the point where it started to affect the girl's friendships. Then one night shortly before school started Becca disappears.

Heather is now a child psychologist, married and living her best life, or so she thinks until an envelope is left at her office with Becca's half of their best friends necklace. As more of Becca's things find their way to Heather she knows she is being threatened and she sets out to find out who from her past is haunting her no matter what she has to do.

I will admit that I wanted to like this book far more than I ended up actually liking it and I feel that is because Heather was not the type of character that you can root for. It really has nothing to do with her past, she was just lacking something. The mystery it's self well written but the I just couldn't feel myself rooting for Heather.

Another book in which no one will just say, "Hey, so let me answer your question and get this all over with." I did enjoy the Red Lady story and I appreciated the childhood trauma element of it. I just wish it had been written better. And why do half of the books I read this month have descriptions of people tearing their cuticles until they bleed? Is this really so common?

My favorite part of the story were the flashbacks, but they were the parts I thought were the worst written. I know the point of view is a 12 year old. In some ways it was authentic. Some authors manage to use a child's voice very effectively. This story needed to find the balance between a 12 year old voice and a 12 year old writing. The Red Lady was scary, maybe because I was reading it on an iPad during a 31 hour power outage. Still, I was a little nervous when I looked around the room and realized everyone else had left. The heartbreak that goes along with it, the sadness of Becca's life...that was the real heart of this story.

The present day Heather is just annoying. How did she ever become a psychologist? She runs around getting angry that people will not be open with her and then completely shuts down anyone asking her questions. She runs around the entire book just acting like a crazy person. Yes, she is experiencing a traumatic event. However, she should know better than the average person that she needs help and that she was traumatized as a child.

I give this a three based on the childhood story alone. Thanks to Netgalley, Damien Angelica Walters, and Crooked Lane Books for the advanced copy.

Thank you to Netgalley and Crooked Lane Books for a copy of the eARC in exchange for a fair review.


Heather has a pretty great life, she has a job she loves, and a husband that is great. Until the day she gets the best friends forever necklace in the mail. She starts freaking out that someone might know her biggest secret. That she was the reason that Becca was dead, well and the Red Lady.


She embarks on a mission to find out who is tormenting her and thinks she has it figured out when she finds out that Becca's mother is out of jail. Well spoilers...so that is all I am going to say about what is going on in this book.


This is supposed to be a supernatural thriller, what it felt like to me was a unreliable narrator. Sometimes that is a fantastic thing, sometimes it is a hot mess express. This was more of a hot mess express. Even though I had a vague idea of what is going on and the synopsis tells you basically the whole plot. It just fell short for me, at times I really thought Heather was crazy like legit crazy.


I honestly didn't like her or feel bad for her, and once the story was explained I still was shaking my head and really just didn't get it. It reminded me of a true crime story about the girls who killed their friend and claimed Slenderman made them or something like that. Or maybe that was a movie I saw. I don't know, but I just didn't get the supernatural vibe I was supposed too. I wanted to like this, I read it all, but I just didn't love this

Really enjoyable horror/thriller book which I think will appeal to anyone who loved Goosebumps, Point Horror or Stephen King when they were young. I occasionally found the main character's behavior implausible but for the most part I was swept up in the fast-moving, nail-biting story. Very fun and quite scary too.

I received a free advance reader copy of this book in return for an honest review. I’m leaving this review voluntarily.

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Four friends. Two pieces of a necklace. One death. One dark secret never meant to be discovered.

The Dead Girls Club is a book split into two parts. One part takes place some 30-ish years in the past, and tells the story of four young girls who are obsessed with murder and serial killers. The second part takes place in the present, when everyone is grown up and living their own separate lives.

But one life is about to be severely interrupted when our narrator, Heather, receives a piece of mail containing an item she hasn’t seen since the night her best friend Becca died. Half of a Best Friends necklace; the other half of which she already has.

Scared and paranoid, Heather begins an investigation into just who sent her the necklace, and we find out just what led up to the events of Becca’s death.

---

First and foremost, this book reminded me instantly of Pretty Little Liars. A group of girls, led by a somewhat bitchy queen bee, breaks up after the death of said queen bee. Years later, something resurfaces that disrupts lives, and an investigation ensues to find out where it came from and why.

Right off the bat, I can say that I like child-Heather more than adult-Heather. Adult-Heather is rather self-absorbed, and although she’s a youth psychologist, with her main clientele being troubled kids, she always seems to be more interested in her own things rather than her patients. She also seems like an awful wife; being short-tempered with her husband, and lying to him.

The author is also very fond of sentence fragments. Sometimes these can work, since it gives a sense of desperation or franticness to what’s happening, but when it happens over and over and over again, it kind of loses its punch.

Going back to Heather; I don’t know if she’s always been this attentive to her patients, or if this only started happening after that necklace turned up, but she’s an awful therapists. These are children she’s supposed to be helping; troubled children who really need someone. But she’s far too wrapped up in what’s going on with her own life to care much about them.

Admittedly, I’ve never murdered anyone and hid their body, but does paranoia really set in that fast? It went zero to a million in the space of a couple of pages. Maybe she was always that paranoid and it was lurking just beneath the surface, but I can’t imagine she spent 30-ish years of her life being as twitchy as she is.
Almost immediately after the necklace is sent to her, she starts flaking on her job, stalking ex-friends, and paying shady internet sites to get her personal information on people. Every conversation her friends or family try to have with her inevitably end up causing more paranoid thoughts. Every shadow turns into someone watching her. Every random object is somehow connected to Becca, her dead friend. She begins feeling, hearing, and smelling things that aren’t there. She develops nervous habits, such as picking at her skin to the point it bleeds. Obsessed with her old friends, she starts cyber-stalking them, and physically stalking them, looking for any excuse she can find to “accidentally” meet up with them. Anyone who gets close to her is suspected of spying. She gets suspicious of her husband, who seems to be getting a lot of strange phone calls.

We also get the most cliche trope in the horror books: breathing over the phone before hanging up. That one is so old it’s not even scary anymore.

(Also, I know there’s a famous saying among authors that goes “Said is not dead”, but can someone please inform this author that there are other words to use than “says”? I counted six uses of it on one page alone.)

Interestingly, not only does this book take place in two different time periods, but it also takes place in two different tenses. THEN scenes are written in past tense, while NOW scenes are written in present tense. I thought this was clever, as it really feels like things are happening many years removed from each other.

We get a lot of name drops, both THEN and NOW, and I’m not sure if they’re supposed to be shoutouts as a fan, or something else, but it’s a frequent occurrence.

As Heather’s investigation continues, she becomes more and more disconnected from reality, to the point that I’ve questioned more than once how much was taking place in her head, and how much was actually happening. She’s clearly become an unreliable narrator, but was she already unreliable before she received Becca’s half of the necklace, or did that only happen afterwards? For that matter, could she have been unreliable from the very beginning, when she was only twelve years old?

The Red Lady is probably the most interesting part of the book to me. The idea of a woman being accused of witchcraft and punished isn’t a new one, but the author brings a fresh twist to it that I really liked.

She brings the biggest air of mystery to the book, constantly keeping you questioning whether she’s real, or if she’s just a made-up story. Are the things Heather experiences both as a child and an adult because of a supernatural presence, or are they the first signs of a fragile mind coming unraveled?

I know I’ve complained a lot about Heather, and that may come off as disliking the book. But the truth is, I loved it. Heather is the kind of main character that’s fun to hate. And I know that I shouldn’t hate her, because something is clearly not right with her, so all of this isn’t a case of her willfully behaving the way she is, but… I don’t know, I just can’t bring myself to like her, and I was okay with that. I looked forward to finding out what new downward spiral she would get into as the book progressed.

The ending was a pleasant surprise. I thought I knew how it was going to end; I had two scenarios that I was sure were going to end up happening. I was wrong on both counts, which I appreciated. Books like this are best when you can’t predict the ending, and I wasn’t able to.

I highly, highly recommend reading this book.

(Actual score: 4.6/5)

Wow! Fans of Heather Gudenkauf's Before She Was Found will absolutely fall for this one, too. Red Lady, Red Lady- the chant that will forever haunt Heather as she remembers her childhood best friend, Becca. After all, The Red Lady was who ultimately killed Becca, not Heather. Or, at least, that's what she keeps telling herself. But, she really can't remember and The Red Lady is just a made up story anyway. It was never real.

So then why do things of Becca's keep showing up, tormenting her and scaring her? Could The Red Lady really not be just some story Becca made up? No, that's impossible. Heather is an adult now, she knows better, but...nothing is making sense any more.

This is a wild, fast paced thriller that you won't be able to put down. I couldn't figure it out, myself, so I felt like I was living the nervousness and fear that Heather was. I literally felt my heart racing with her when she would hear someone.

If I could give this more than 5 stars, I would. I hope everyone reads it. It's such a great story and I'll never forget The Red Lady!

This is a fun spooky thriller that kept me turning pages. Thank you to Net Galley and the publisher. My review opinion is my own.
This is told from the narrative of a woman who is living a nightmare when her childhood fear has come to life. The story deftly goes from past to present. I like the authors way of weaving the story around the past events. A fun and engaging read. Good for all who enjoy a spooky thriller and stories of friendship intersection with the past. It reminded me of Gone Girl in the build up to the events with wonderful twist and turns. Very fun read.