Happy Pub Week to How To Kill Your Best Friend by @lexieelliottwrites !!

Each chapter starts with a method to kill your best friend and adds suspense and thrill to the mystery! ! Lizza, Georgie and Bronwyn are best friends bonded by their love for swimming. Lizza lost her life at the island she was staying with her husband Jem. All her friends are gathered for her memorial and stuck at the island due to bad weather.

Each and every person is suspicious of some malicious activity and the story gets darker and murkier as it progresses. This was a very fast paced, totally gripping mystery that I could not put down at all.

Seriously I kept guessing till the end no I highly recommend this thriller to all you booksta friends out there!

Thank you @berkleypub and @netgalley for the #gifted galley and@berittalksbooks @dg_reads and @phdivabooks for including me in #berkleywritesstrongwomen #berkleybuddyreads chat!!

This book is a suspense novel written for young adult readers. I enjoyed the navigation of relationships amongst a circle of hard-partying friends as they grew into adults. They made some potentially life-altering mistakes and poor choices, yet they loved each other like family.

How to Kill Your Best Friend by Lexie Elliott is a story about a tight-knit group of friends who met at a British University swimming sports program. They have gathered to mourn the drowning death of a top-notch competitive swimmer at the island resort she owned with her husband. The celebration of life is barely over before other ominous events occur. The group is finding their friendship tested by this in addition to a few well-kept secrets.

There was a bit of internal monologue within each of the two surviving women that slowed the pace at times. It provided insight into their decision-making process, but I found it to be a bit overwritten. Still, I thought the action-packed finale was well worth the wait!

It starts with the methods, a section for each. The story builds slowly. Oh, the pressure, Did she? Or was it him? A little at a time the facts are revealed. Can you guess? Do you know? Not until the end. What a ride this is.

This one was full of misdirection and intrigue. Trust no one in this tale for sure. I set out totally blind in it and sometimes struggled to stay focused on it. Overall a decent read but some parts were hard to puzzle out.

In spite of this title, I am not actually trying to get rid of a best friend, but I am suggesting she read this!
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I just read How To Kill Your Best Friend by Lexie Elliot. Talk about a title to grab you and draw you into a book immediately! Have you ever bought a book based on the title alone?
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There is so much about this book that I enjoyed as much as the title. Being a swimmer, I kept picturing myself and my teammates as the main characters who have gathered together to honor one of their best friends who died swimming at her luxurious resort. It is always mysterious when a good swimmer drowns. When there is rumored to be a serpent in the depths and secrets keep floating to the surface, who wouldn’t be a bit suspicious?
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This twisting tale is told in alternating points of view with an unknown narrator in the mix to add some extra intrigue. I enjoyed getting a view from each narrator and suspected everyone at some point. Threats, an exotic remote island, and stormy weather all contributed to the thrill in this thriller.
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To put it in swimmer’s terms, this book is more a long distance race that takes awhile to get heated instead of a quick 100m sprint that leaves you breathless. The slow build, as new revelations and each new possible way to kill your best friend are introduced, worked well for me in this book. Then again, I was always a long distance swimmer.
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There may be many ways to kill your best friend, but there is one easy way to find out what happens in this novel- get it and read it! It came out this week so it is available now. Best friends beware.

Georgie, Lissa and Bronwyn bonded in college over their love of swimming on the team. Swimming is what brought them together and ultimately took Lissa’s life. They all gather at the resort Lissa owned with her husband, and where she died, for a memorial. The resort is paradise until bad weather traps everyone there and they quickly realize no one can be trusted.
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This was so fast paced, I raced to the ending. I loved how each chapter was separated by a chapter on different methods of murder which is so twisted and added some additional darkness to this thriller. I don’t want to say too much more to give anything away but this was a thriller that kept me guessing.
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How to Kill Your Best Friend by Lexie Elliott is a slow burning thriller. This thriller read is told from a dual perspective of two of the three best friends involved, Georgie and Bronwyn, alternating their points of view between each of the chapters. There’s also a list of methods for this madness of killing one’s best friend interspersed between some of the chapters such as opening with Method 1: Accident which will show murder is not always as easy as the books make it out to be!

Georgie, Lissa, and Bronwyn were once the best of friends as they bonded in university over their shared love of swimming. The trio has now been split apart with the death of Lissa and Georgie and Bronwyn don’t know how to feel losing their best friend. The ladies have gathered at Kanu Lake to mourn their friend but Georgie cannot fathom how Lissa could have possibly drowned, the best swimmer among them. Things just do not feel right on the island despite the gorgeous surroundings or beautiful villas.

So I’m not always a huge fan of a slow burn thriller like I found in How to Kill Your Best Friend but this one was not so bad. Perhaps it was the fact the mystery was taking place in a luxurious vacation type of setting which I always adore or the creative format with the murder lists interspersed between the chapters but whatever it may be I did enjoy waiting for the action to unfold. It could definitely have used a bit less focus on the swimming in the middle though. The other thing that I found with this one was I was quite sure I knew what would happen and was just waiting to find out the specifics at the end. So combine the slower pace and what seemed easy to solve for me as an avid read I ended up giving this one three and a half stars overall.

I received an advance copy from the publisher via NetGalley.

I was initially excited to read this book as several friends really enjoyed it. However after a third of the book I ended up skimming just to get to the end.

I found that the voices were too similar and I had to keep figuring out who was talking.

Once again I also felt that the characters acted younger than their ages.

Basically I just wasn't the right audience for this book.

Since I didn't really read this book thoroughly I will not post a review on purchasing sites. This one just wasn't a right fit for me.

Thank you for the opportunity to read and review this title.

This was such a page-turner for me from the onset. I tend to like stories about reunions of college buddies, although in this case, it’s because one of their friends was missing and presumed dead, hence the get together for a memorial. Love the atmospheric beach setting. I can almost smell the salt in the air and feel the spray of the ocean water as the characters dive and swim across the cove. Add to that the mystery of the Kanu serpent and you have a thrilling locked room mystery feel of the story. I enjoyed the dual POVs and the interludes of different methods on how to kill your best friend.😁 There were lots of red herrings and I kept on guessing wrongly but it was such a fun read! Georgie, Lissa and Bronwyn were all such complex yet strong characters —I didn’t agree with them most of the time, but I do admire them for being badass in their own ways. One of my favorite parts was during the time when the ladies were in the ocean swimming and fighting to stay alive. The author did a great job describing the scene and their swim strokes that you really can imagine swimming in that cold ocean and wanting to survive the treacherous waves! I enjoyed all of Lexie Elliott’s books but this may be my favorite of her 3 novels. I really loved the aspect of the Kanu serpent myth on top of the unexpected twists. Do add this to your tbr, thrillernerds! It’s out TODAY! 🥳🥳🥳

Rating: 4.5/5

If the title doesn’t grab your attention, then the first chapter will. Georgie, Lissa, and Bronwyn have been best friends since their college swim team days. Swimming has been their passion, their escape, and what tied the three of them together. Until, Lissa, the strongest swimmer of the three of them, has drowned at the remote island resort she owned with her husband. How can this be?

“We’re a three-legged stool that lost a leg. We have to find a new way to balance.”

When Georgie and Bronwyn join Lissa’s closest friends and her husband at the resort for her funeral, weird things begin to happen. They seem to be the only people on the resort since all the guests left after Lissa’s death and rumors of a serpent in the water scared them off. Is that how Lissa drowned? Then disturbing messages are left for Georgie and Bronwyn that start to make them wonder if this really was just an accident.

“It’s not hard to commit murder, is it? It’s the getting away with it that’s difficult.”

As with any thriller, you never know who you can trust in the story. Georgie and Bronwyn share alternating chapters revealing the history of their friendships and what is happening at the resort. But, in between those chapters, are short chapters that offer ways to kill your best friend and why that method may or may not work. The problem, as the reader finds out, is that no method is fool-proof. Not everything is always what it seems in these types of novels and there is a bit of secrecy and unreliable information which makes for good twists. I have to admit I felt a bit nervous during one of the ocean scenes and it sent my anxiety really high. There are several scenes located in the ocean and one in an ocean cave that required me to put the book down until morning so I didn’t have bad dreams. I found I was better off just reading this one during the daytime.

“The universe takes a perverse joy in making sure our secrets don’t stay secret for long.”

Most of the characters were likable and I enjoyed trying to figure out what each person might be hiding. Elliott takes time to tell their backstories and why this group is so close and yet so mistrustful of each other. The setting was eerie and full of doom which played into the creepiness of the big reveal towards the end.

Secrets and lies never go well together and for this group of friends, it spelled TROUBLE. Pick this one up if you like twisted storylines of friendships gone wrong and surprise endings.

I reviewed Elliott’s debut novel, THE FRENCH GIRL, which was also about best friends from college, a murder, and long-held secrets. Scroll down for more of my thoughts on that one.

How to Kill Your Best Friend by Lexie Elliott

If you want to kill your best friend, the research of methods to do so has been done for you. Just check the beginning of each chapter to get the dope (poison is one of the methods). Nothing is foolproof though and that's the problem.

Georgie, Lissa, and Bronwyn have been a close trio since their college days although Bron knows Georgie and Lissa had a bond that even she couldn't penetrate. All three were and still are excellent swimmers, having competed in college. They are very close to several of the guys swimmers/polo players from their college years and the group meet up several times a year. But Georgie missed the last meetup, the one where Lissa, the strongest swimmer of the group, drowned. It doesn't make sense that such a thing could happen. Several months after the drowning, the rest of the group is meeting up on the island of the beautiful resort that Lissa owned with her husband.

We experience this story through the eyes of Georgie and Bron. No one is at ease, which is understandable since they are all meeting to remember their dead friend. Georgie and Bron have big secrets, known only to each of them. But so do Lissa's husband and the men of their group. Things begin to feel very dangerous when Georgie and Bron receive threatening messages. Not only that, Georgie starts getting emails from Lissa that had been caught in her work guarantee system and now she is sure that Lissa was up to no good before she died.

Everyone looks suspicious of something, Georgie and Bron have close calls with danger, the weather turns bad, and now they are all stranded on an island that has turned murderous. Who is the anonymous person narrating the passages at the beginning of each chapter? Unreliable narration is a very real possibility.

I enjoyed the mystery of this story very much, although this book holds some of the longest passages I've ever read. Also, so much focus on swimming slowed things down. We get lost in the thoughts of Georgie and Bron so often that they seemed to blend together at times. Still, this seems to be a very smart group, maybe too devious and clever for their own good. I really wasn't sure who did what until the very end and I liked the twists and turns my brain took, trying to "follow the money".

Published August 17th 2021

Thank you to Berkley Publishing Group and NetGalley for this ARC.

I mean, how can you resist a book with this title? It's made for an HBO limited series, right? And the story is worthy of one too.

I'm not going to tell you too much about the plot of 𝗛𝗢𝗪 𝗧𝗢 𝗞𝗜𝗟𝗟 𝗬𝗢𝗨𝗥 𝗕𝗘𝗦𝗧 𝗙𝗥𝗜𝗘𝗡𝗗 (and highly suggest you don't read the synopsis) because the less you know going into this thriller by Lexie Elliott, the better.

The broad strokes: college pals Georgie and Bronwyn reunite at an exclusive island resort for the funeral of their best friend, Lissa, who mysteriously drowned. But what brought the three of them together was being on the swim team and Lissa was the strongest swimmer of them all. Along with another teammate, Duncan, their friend Adam and Lissa's widowed husband, Jem, they gather to remember Lissa but also start to question whether what really happened to her.

This book starts off slowly but once it takes off, it is one heck of a ride with some wild twists I did not see coming. It was the perfect vacation read and I was so wrapped up in reading it on the beach that I may have ignored my kids for most of the day. #sorrynotsorry

Thanks to @berittalksbooks, @dg_reads and @thephdivabooks for including me in the #BerkleyWritesStrongWomen #BerkleyBuddyReads chat for this terrific book and to Berkely Publishing and NetGalley for the copy to review.

HOW TO KILL YOUR BEST FRIEND by Lexie Elliott is a fun, escapist thriller about a group of friends who gather at a hotel on a remote island for the funeral of one of their own. Though Lissa's death has been ruled an accident, her best friend, Georgie, begins to wonder whether that's really true. As strange messages and threats begin to appear, the "accident" theory looks less and less likely. Secrets emerge and loyalties are tested as Georgie tries to get to the bottom of the mystery before she becomes the next victim.

The prose in this book is solid, which is key to gaining the reader's trust. The mystery is also well-plotted for the most part with the trickle of information and memories of the past to inform the present. Certain pieces of the puzzle seemed obvious before they were meant to be, but thanks to the solid writing and characterization, it's easy to go along for the ride regardless.

Speaking of characterization, the three leading women feel fleshed out and realistic, especially Georgie. Though she has her flaws, she pops off the page with intelligence, bravery, and loyalty. The men are perhaps a bit enigmatic and interchangeable. I also think the mythical element of the story feels either misplaced or underdeveloped. But all things considered, HOW TO KILL YOUR BEST FRIEND is a solid read and great entertainment!

Enticing title, isn’t it?

As author Lexie Elliott lists ways to kill your best friend and the pros and cons of each, she presents a mystery about university swim team members who reunite at an island resort for the memorial service of a group member who disappeared while swimming at night. After the service, they catch up with each other as they try to understand why a strong swimmer like Lissa would put herself at risk in the open waters near the resort she owned with her husband. Soon the remote location, ominous messages, and their own secrets are exposed, as fellow swimmers Georgie and Bron try to figure out what’s going on before something terrible happens to them.

The story is told through narrators Georgie and Bron, who bring different perspectives and knowledge that gives readers a better idea of what has been happening and why. Georgie is an executive who had distanced herself from the group by moving to New York and avoiding social gatherings with the others. Bronwyn tried to live as an ideal British housewife and mother whose past shows that it could be easier said than done at times.

It’s easy to list some of the classic tropes Elliott uses to tell her tale, but that leaves out the unique flavor she adds with her own twists. The story includes long-kept secrets, toxic relationships, romance, and local folktales to deliver a fun vacation story that deftly ties up loose ends. One jaw-dropping resolution is unexpected yet fits completely within the story presented. It’s an enjoyable journey that’s great vacation reading - well, maybe not if you’re staying at a secluded resort with friends.

Elliott identifies who has been considering killing their best friend and which option could have been a choice for this mystery. But if you’re thinking about killing your own best friend, make sure you read all of the Cons shown for each option. I suggest reading this fun book instead and living vicariously through the characters instead of carrying out your own plot.

Ok, so I wasn’t really sure what to expect when I requested Lexie Elliott’s How to Kill Your Best Friend, because, well, I couldn’t see any reason why I’d ever want to know. Which is why I requested it in the first place. After all, how bad can a BFF be???

Georgie, Bron, and their friends gather to mourn the death of their friend Lissa, but Georgie has questions – and a LOT of concerns – around Lissa’s death. How does a swimmer who hates night swims, go swimming at night and drown? And what’s up with the cryptic emails Lissa sent before she died?

What I liked about How to Kill Your Best Friend are the parts where Georgie actually mulls over the methods one could use: accident, poison, hiring a hit man, electrocution, shooting, hit-and-run, strangulation/assault/battery, drowning… And why none would work. And you wonder if Georgie killed Lissa after all, even though she wasn’t there. Then you wonder why Georgie’s got a list. (I also got an earworm of Train’s 50 Ways to Say Goodbye playing in a nonstop loop, adding more methods – though Train’s song isn’t about murder at all, so…) (I’m kinda bummed “run over by a crappy purple Scion” wasn’t listed in the details for “accident”…)

Then you find out that everyone has secrets – some more serious than others, some with more ramifications than others. And some lead to long-held crazed notions of disloyalty, and revenge.

Parts of How to Kill Your Best Friend get a bit slow (like, how many times can you repeat that x happened) but overall this was quite an enjoyable read. Even for someone who doesn’t want to kill her best friend.

drey’s rating: Excellent!

Though it feels strange to type this given the content but this twisty whodunit was so fun! Georgie has gathered with her friends Bronwyn, Adam, and Duncan to celebrate the life of their dear friend Lissa. Their friendship was forged by their dedication to their swim team in college. So it seems odd that Lissa supposedly drowned. And that they never found a body.

Still they gather at the lavish resort owned by Lissa and her second husband. Her first husband, and seemingly love of her life, died under mysterious circumstances as well. The longer the friends spend time together, alarming messages are sent to members of the group. Could there be more behind the story of Lissa’s death?

This was my first book by Lexie Elliot but it will not be the last. Her writing style was fantastic and made this sometimes zany story compulsively readable! The characters were all so complex and well developed! I loved the growth of Georgie throughout the story. Though the twist wasn’t completely shocking- it made for an intense climatic scene that satisfyingly delivered! I would recommend this book to anyone who loves a good thriller!

How to Kill Your Best Friend provides an outlined guide of all the way to get rid of BFF but be careful nothing is quite full proof.

Five College friends come together at an exclusive island resort to mourn the death of a member of their pack. The deceased, Lissa and her husband, own the island paradise where they have gathered. What happened to her? Why would she risk her life in an apparent dangerous cove for a swim? What is lurking in water, a serpent?

The novel is told by Georgie and Bron, best friends of Lissa. Together, they harbor a secret that isn't Georgie's to tell. Bron soon finds herself the victim of cryptic messages indicting she's to blame for her friends death. Suspicions rise as unfortunate events begin to plague the resort, and everyone begins to silently point fingers within the friendship circle.

The book is slow in the beginning before the action takes shape. You'll be trying to catch your breath for the ending!!

Thank you NetGalley and Berkley Publishing Group for the complimentary copy.

Although this book initially seemed like it would be a good thriller/ mystery, I actually found there was very little build up of atmosphere and I was launched into something that I had very little interest for and found it difficult reading.

Book Review: How to Kill Your Best Friend by Lexie Elliott

There's a lot to talk about with this book, but I don't want to ruin any of the surprises because I highly recommend reading it!

I love these "group of friends" thrillers because there are always soo many secrets involved. I really liked that this group were brought together through swimming in college, and still meet up after college to go on swimming vacations together. But it is the funeral of one of their own that brings them together this time.

Interspersed are short chapters about different potential ways to kill your best friend which really helps to increase tension as you don't know who the narrator is!

Will all the secrets come out before someone else gets hurt??

Thank you @berkleypub and @netgalley for this ARC! I loved reading it!

How to Kill Your Best Friend releases on Aug. 17th!!

#bookreview #bookstagram #lexieelliott #howtokillyourbestfriend #berkleyig #girlswhoread #instabooks #reading #readingwithsnacks #bookphotography #bookrecommendations #bibliophile #thrillerbooks #netgalley

I was intrigued by the title and premise of this book but it failed to live up to my expectations. Told in alternating chapters from the perspective of two female friends, Georgie and Brom whose close friend Lissa is missing and presumed drowned. The alternating chapters didn't work for me as the characters didn't have distinctive voices and I often mistook one for the other until I had their back stories straight. The chapters on discarded ways to kill your best friend were clever and kept me reading until the end of this uneven mystery.

Copy provided by the publisher and NetGalley