Thanks to Netgalley for providing me with this e-ARC in exchange for my honest review.

The events of The Girls Weekend take place over mostly two days- the day that June Moody arrives at her frenemy Sadie's beautiful estate for a girls' reunion, and the next morning, when June and the others awake to find that they have few memories of the night before- and that Sadie is missing. While this was a fairly good thriller, it didn't "wow" me in any way. I found the characters to be a little unlikeable and unbelievable, and I didn't connect as much with the main character Moody as much as I would have liked.

I was immediately drawn to The Girls Weekend by Jody Gehrman because I love books with groups of people who either have to survive something (like Force of Nature by Jane Harper) or have to survive each other (such as Shari Lapena’s novel, An Unwanted Guest).

This book exceeded my expectations! The author did a fantastic job with the plot and keeping the tension tight all the way through.

Take a look:

June Moody, a thirty-something English professor, just wants to get away from her recent breakup and reunite with girlfriends over summer break. Her old friend and longtime nemesis, Sadie MacTavish, a mega-successful author, invites June and her college friends to a baby shower at her sprawling estate in the San Juan Islands. June is less than thrilled to spend time with Sadie–and her husband, June’s former crush–but agrees to go.

The party gets off to a shaky start when old grudges resurface, but when they wake the next morning, they find something worse: Sadie is missing, the house is in shambles, and bloodstains mar the staircase. None of them has any memory of the night before; they wonder if they were drugged. Everyone’s a suspect. Since June had a secret rendezvous with Sadie’s husband, she has plenty of reason to suspect herself. Apparently, so do the cops.

A Celtic knot of suspense and surprise, this brooding, atmospheric novel will keep you guessing as each twist reveals a new possibility. It will remind you of friendships hidden in the depths of your own past, and make you wonder how well you really know the people you’ve loved the longest.

I was honestly wondering who did it and why? Everyone had a motive. Usually, I can figure things out pretty early on in books like this but I was reading quickly to find out what truly happened. You might want to read this one in a single sitting as the mystery and intrigue keep you glued to the pages!

I cannot wait to see what Jody writes next!

You can pre-order the book here, will be delivered to your Kindle on June 9.

Love love loved this!! I can’t wait to have this for our book of the month in my book club! This is an extremely well written page turner. Packed full of twists and turns that kept me guess every page!

Five college friends get together after 10 years for a baby shower of one of them and things take a turn for the worse when their hostess goes missing.

The main character June Moody didn't really want to go on this weekend but does after her boyfriend breaks up with her via text. I know we are supposed to like June but I just didn't. Her inability to get over her envy of Sadie is just sad. You want to tell her to grow up throughout the book. I think this book had potential but we needed to see more of the relationships and history these characters had with each other to care about them and what happened.

The actual mystery wasn't bad and it does lead you in several different directions before revealing who committed the crime. While I was correct in my guess I did change my mind at least once before I settled on the perpetrator. It is always nice to not automatically know who did it.

I received a copy of this book via NetGalley for my honest review.

This was an amazing read. I literally could not put it down.
Not my usual detective crime fiction book, but a wonderfully modern, old whodunnit.
The setting was beautiful, in a big country mansion in Washington state, five old college friends reunite for a girls weekend.
The plot is full of secrets, twists and love triangles with a bit of memory loss thrown in for good measure!
I’d definitely recommend this book to escape into on a rainy weekend.

The premise of this book is a fabulous one and really grabbed my attention when I was looking for something to read. Five friends from college gather for weekend to celebrate the pregnancy of one of them. Old jealousies and new conflicts fester as the women attempt to enjoy the weekend. However a tragic event and the secrets each person is keeping turns the weekend into a nightmare.

Though the beginning was slow and it took me some time to get into the book, the middle was fast-paced and intriguing as everyone’s secrets began to come to light. I do wish there had been more development of some of the relationships and characters in the book. Those developments would have made the book more plausible.

Thank you Netgalley for an early copy of The Girls Weekend

June Moody has just been dumped and her college friends are pressuring her to join them on a girls weekend at the home of Sadie, her college nemesis. Sadie and June have always been rivals fighting over grades, scholarships and most importantly Ethan; whom Sadie won marrying him years ago and had a daughter with. Sadie is also a massively successful children's author, much to the wannabe writer June's chagrin. Rounding out the group is Amy, Sadie's very pregnant cousin who struggles with a mood disorder. EM, June's closest friend who is hiding a dark secret from her past and Kimiko, the rebellious single mother. The weekend is wrought with tension as Sadie's domineering behavior pushes everyone to their breaking point. When the girls awake from a drunken night with limited memories they discover Sadie has vanished and a blood stain in the hallway alludes to a violent confrontation but what happened and could any of them really been pushed far enough to do the unspeakable?

This is an enjoyable whodunit centered around a group of college friends who might not really be friends after all. All of the characters are a bit unlikable which works to keep the suspense up, that if Sadie is really dead any one of them could be the murderer. This was fast paced read with a few twisty plotlines.

Little too kitschy for my taste, as I was expecting a twisty serious story. Expectations ruin the party again!!!

Thank you to netgalley for the arc of The Girls Weekend.
Five old college friends get together after many years for the weekend. June doesn't want to go to the reunion. She's always had an up and down relationship with Sadie, and she used to date Sadie's husband. Once the weekend starts so does the drama. A somewhat predictable story but could have turned in almost anyone's direction for the culprit.

This locked-room mystery from Crooked Lane Books and Jody Gehrman is going to be such a great beach read!

Five friends that haven’t seen each other in twenty years get together for a weekend reunion. One of them goes missing and the mystery unfurls.

I don’t want to spoil things, so I’ll just say this is a slow reveal, not a big twist type of thriller. It’s kind of reminiscent of Ruth Ware’s In A Dark, Dark Wood.

Four star read! Thanks to Crooked Lane Books and NetGalley for the advanced copy!

I want to start off by saying thank you for the opportunity to read and review this book, it was a very good read easy to follow along with storyline and characters. This was a new author for me but I very much enjoyed it, thank you for the opportunity and I look forward to reading more by this author again. I highly recommend this book to everybody.

When June and four of her college friends meet up for a girl’s weekend years later, one of them ends up missing. When the rest of the friends can’t remember anything that happened that night, everyone starts to point fingers at the others. Everyone’s a suspect and the pieces need to be put together.

This wasn’t a thriller by any stretch of the imagination. It was a mystery with a slow reveal that just didn’t wow me at all. I wasn’t invested in the characters and just found it a repeat of The Lying Game and In A Dark, Dark Wood, neither of which I enjoyed. I wouldn’t recommend this to thriller lovers. Too repetitive and nothing new.

I had a hard time getting into it... kept falling asleep. I found it very Ruth Ware dark dark wood like. No twists or turns and predictable. A tad disappointed.

Thank you netgalley for this ARC.

Five former college friends reunite over the summer break and English professor June Moody isn't exactly thrilled about going.

Her oldest friend and enemy Sadie, is hosting a girls' weekend baby shower at her massive estate where she lives with June's old crush, now Sadie's husband, and Sadie's pregnant cousin Amy, who she has always looked after.

Things are tense and there is a very uncomfortable feeling to the entire group. The husband is living in the lake house and the cousin living in the guest house and the gardener is living in a yurt. 

After a night of drinking and revisiting old grudges, the morning finds them with no memory of what happened. The house is destroyed. There is blood on the landing. And Sadie is gone.

Everyone is a suspect and with memories sketchy, the suspense was palpable. The women were all pretty horrible and everyone is lying. I think we all knew who did what early on.

As a character, June was my least favorite. I just did not care for her. But the story will leave you wondering how well you know the people you call friends.

NetGalley/June 9th, 2020 by Crooked Lane Books

5 college friends. A long-overdue reunion. A crime scene.
When one of the friends goes missing in suspicious circumstances, it soon transpires that everyone present at the house had a motive to get rid of her.

It was a very thrilling and gripping read.
The story follows June, one of the 5 friends at the reunion, and while I found the beginning a little slow to start, it did pick up pretty quickly, and I was hooked from then on.
I loved how all the grudges were slowly revealed, giving every single person a motive, and making it difficult to bet on anyone in particular. But even though I might not have guessed who the culprit was, I found the reveal didn't deliver enough of a shock. Nonetheless, it was an intriguing and suspenseful page-turner, and I highly recommend it.
It's been a while since I read anything worth a 5-star rating, but I think that despite the aforementioned flaws, this novel does deserve it, as I couldn't put it down.
I haven't read anything from this author, but I'm adding her other books to my wish list.

Thank you to Netgalley and Crooked Lane books for a free copy of this book in exchange for an honest review. All thoughts and feelings are my own.

What to say about The Girls Weekend? It was a solid three star. Nothing bad, but nothing grand either. It was a typical mystery/thriller.

June gets talked into going to a girls weekend with her four best friends from college. She only talks to one of them nowadays. Once there, she starts having fun, until the second night. Everyone wakes up with no memory of what happened and one of their friends is missing.

I never guess who did it. Ever. I am the literal worst. But I guessed it in this book! About 30ish percent in I was like, yeah, this one did it. I don’t know how I feel about guessing it. I’m kind of like, yay, I actually got one! But then I wonder how good it actually was if I could guess the killer. Of course there were clues to lead you astray, red herrings, all that sort of thing. But I found it pretty obvious.

June and the other cast of characters were all good. I liked who I was supposed to and disliked who I was supposed to. My favorite was Kimi, though. She seemed super fun! I want to hang out with her.

What brought it to a three star for me was the ending. I felt like it could have ended a chapter or two earlier. It was basically just what happened in the aftermath, but it wasn’t anything interesting! I was pretty disappointed.

If you’re a thriller fan, you’ll probably like this one. I will definitely recommend it to my thriller reading friends!

Slow and boring. Kept reading just to see how it ended but it felt like it took one million years to get there. Nothing exciting here. Sorry.

This was an enjoyable read but it wasn't particularly gripping. There was a few surprises within it that were cleverly done but overall it was quite predictable. I did enjoy how well the characters had been created and their stories but I just felt something was missing overall.

In this "girl's weekend" story, 5 college friends come together for the weekend, all with their own hidden stories. In theory, this is a get together to celebrate the hostess's live in cousin who is pregnant with who knows whose baby. I had a hard time reconciling the drinking and drugs with a guest of honor who can't do either of those.

And then Sadie, the hostess and celebrated author goes missing. I thought I knew what was going on.

And then the secrets started to come out, including each character's potential motivation for a murder, and Sadie's not-so-perfect-life is revealed. One of the guests, June, remains a suspect and time is running out to figure out what happened. The pacing after the first third of the book is fast and suspenseful. Despite some of the times when I wanted to scream at June for stupid decisions she made, the book was thoroughly engaging and entertaining.

This is the second book I've read in the last three months with the set up of a group of one-time close female friends getting together for a "girl's weekend" only for there to be secrets, murder, and fingers pointed at each other. All this has really taught me is to avoid any sort of weekend gathering with my friends. What I find intriguing is that this book in particular is being marketed as a thriller in the vein of Ruth Ware, yet the other book with the similar premise just happens to be written by, you guessed it, Ruth Ware (In a Dark, Dark Wood). Reading these two so close together, you'd almost think both authors went to the same writing workshop and were given this logline to develop into full story. Even the characters are similar! The main conflict in both is between the jilted writer protagonist whose eyes the story is told through (yet is not particular likeable herself) and her rich/successful "queen bee" counterpart who also just so happens to have the former boyfriend of the author. And that's another hackle-raising issue for me, so much of this story is about some guy and this 17+ year torch being carried for him. These characters are all around 38 or so, yet act and sound about fifteen years younger. I did initially enjoy the creepy vibe of the "locked door" mystery and not being able to trust any of your friends. However, not enough was done with building up tension or stakes and the rushed "big reveal" ending destroyed all of my good will towards this story with its absolute ridiculous melodrama and pure nonsense. Overall, a decent premise but very poor execution.