Thanks for the advance copy of this, but I couldn't get into it. I didn't like the screenplay format at all. And it needs some final editing.

I love mysteries that are interspersed with other ways of telling the story and this one having a blockbuster screenplay throughout was great! I highly enjoyed this thriller I would recommend this to thriller readers and mystery readers a like!

🤔 one of the most interesting conundrums for me, as a book reviewer/bookstagrammer, is recommending a book I didn’t love.

This book here was one of the simply-not-for-me reads.

⭐️⭐️/5

💧I so wanted to like this book - the cover, the plot - I was like “YES PLS”. It just didn’t grab me. Started strong & kind of petered out.
💧lightly suspenseful/mysterious. I found myself becoming drowsy during reading, which is my #1 indicator that I’m not into the book.
💧a bit long at some points, I found the descriptions of various layouts to be confusing
💧female frenemies!! Don’t see that a lot & I enjoyed it immensely 😈
💧heavy dialogue-driven storytelling
💧long chapter length
💧almost DNF’d - more so because it was.. a bit lukewarm? Uneventful. Not a lot of action. & the action that was there didn’t have me on the edge of my seat or anything.

& my good-to-knows:
🔪 missing persons
🔪 friendship drama
🔪 unlikeable characters

Overall, it was okay. Writing the movie script as flash backs was new for me and I enjoyed that. I feel like when a character is writing a book or movie, you don’t often see what they are actually writing. However, I felt like there were a lot of plot holes and a bit overly descriptive. I had a hard time seeing these girls as ever being friends, or agreeing to go anywhere together given how they treated each other. But i enjoyed the ending.

I really enjoyed All Dressed Up so I was really looking forward to Scenes of the Crime, but it was disappointing. None of the characters were at all likable so I found it hard to relate to them. The winery was over described and didn’t have a realistic flow to it. I also found the script scenes interspersed with the narrative a bit annoying. And oh, so many lies.

Jilly Gagnon’s Scenes of the Crime tells the story of four friends who revisit the palatial Oregon winery of trust fund baby, Brittany, which also is the last place any of them saw their college friend, Vanessa, fifteen years earlier. Who brings them back is Emily, the screenwriter of the group, who was likely the last person to see Vanessa the night she disappeared. Emily has had the story of that night bouncing around in her head, along with the questions unanswered for what happened that fateful night. Emily doesn’t remember all the details, so by bringing together the group to reminisce on the fifteen year mark of Vanessa’s disappearance, she is hoping to fill in the gaps of what happened.

This was a difficult read for me. I gave the book 25% of the material to grab me and push me to keep reading it. Unfortunately, I found my mind wandering more than being sucked in to the material. The screenwriter script parts made me often pause to interpret abbreviations. I felt it was a little odd, but I know authors are looking for something different sometimes. Of course, when the main character is a screenwriter, you can see why Gagnon included it. I didn’t get enough of truly who Emily was before the cast of supporting characters came in and I wasn’t fond of the glimpse of personality that came through with them. This book was a DNF for me. ⭐️

Thank you to NetGalley and Random House Publishing Group-Ballantine for the advanced copy. Opinions expressed are my own. This book is set for publication on September 5, 2023.

#netgalley #arc #bookstagram

First and foremost I would like to thank netgalley and the publisher for allowing me to read this ARC.

What if your college days could be turned into the ultimate screenplay? The good, the bad, the ugly….

Emily and her friends thought that their spring break 15 years ago would be amazing but when Vanessa(also known as Vee) goes missing, the girls trip they thought was joyful turns ugly.

Bitterness and jealousy floods this novel, it was shocking to have the plot twist unfold within every chapter.

Did Vee really die or did she disappear without a trace leaving her friends to pick up the pieces?

I enjoyed the story line very much. Emily, the main character, is a writer. Some of the format it appears she is writing a script, but this format goes into true events and I got a confused.
There were some twists and this was definitely a slow burn mystery.
Thank you NetGalley for the ARC.

I really couldn't get into this. It offered some original ideas and the author's approach was pretty creative, but the story never truly grabbed me. It took me a few days to read this, which is longer than usual for me. Still, I think this book will find its audience.

You really can't trust anyone. I too had sketchy friends as a young adult. I don't think any of them did anything too crazy but they might have if they were smarter.
I loved the way this was written with first person and a screenplay. That was wonderful.

I love the sound of the plot, but the characters were a little less realistic. Not to the last few chapters did I getting to the core of the story line.

This was a big disappointment. The idea sounded fun but the characters ranged from dull to awful and I barely was able to force myself to finish the book.

The layout of the winery scarcely made sense as did the plot. I don’t know what was going on here but it wasn’t good,

I did like the idea of the movie script chapters as flash backs/alternative scenarios but it wasn’t enough to save the book

The plot of this one sounded promising, but it fell pretty flat for me. First of all, the characters were horribly UNlikeable. Each of them were unappealing in some way, even Emily the "wholesome Minnesotan" screenwriter.

The premise of the story is a bit two-fold. First, it tells the story about a group of girls that get together to "give closure" to the loss of their friend Vanessa, who went missing 15 years prior. Simultaneously, Emily is trying to write a script about what really happened, and she wants to use the getaway as an opportunity to do some digging/ask some questions. The narrative folds as a mixture of current time, past history, first person narrative, and screen-writing.

I can't say too much without spoiling the story, but overall, I didn't love it. The mixture of traditional storytelling plus screen-writing made the "true" narrative feel a little confusing. The ending was only okay... without saying more than I should, I just felt like the girls didn't "deserve" how they ended up.

Four college friends reunite for closure after being haunted by the specter of a woman believed to be dead as a result of their actions fifteen years ago in Scenes of the Crime by Jilly Gagnon.
Emily, a screenwriter with ambitions of getting her own work out there after years on a successful though mind-numbing sitcom, is inspired to revisit the disappearance of her compelling friend Vanessa during a spring break trip with her college friends yet again after seeing someone who looks like Vanessa fifteen years after she was supposed dead. With a renewed determination to finally get her story told, Emily convinces the remaining friends to get together for a reunion weekend where Vanessa disappeared so they can get closure, but really Emily wants to learn from each of them exactly what happened that night years ago. Bringing together the unlikely quartet of Brittany, Vanessa’s entitled cousin, Paige, a former athlete eager to bow to whoever has power, and Lydia, the dark humored wallflower, Emily, the mediator of the group, begins to piece together portions of that night from the others’ perspectives, which they reluctantly share and that they’ve kept hidden for years, that results in the truth behind a tantalizing mystery, which Emily drafts out for the screen as new details are revealed.
Alternating between prose and the script of a screenplay, the narrative develops in what appears to be both a real and fictional version of the group’s remembered and current experiences related to Vanessa’s disappearance; the screen written portions move swiftly and portray a fitting cinematic feel, making it incredibly easy to envision the events taking place and the expressions on the faces of the characters in the frequently tense situations they find themselves in. The truth of what occurred was hidden from readers behind a layered, revisionist storytelling tactic of the narrative to weave stories that could each be plausible, which obscured the truth and reality of the situation for a prolonged time with less of a satisfying payoff than might be expected. The dynamic between the “friends” is strained and toxic, conveying cliquish behavior that was frustrating to witness despite it possessing a realistic quality stemming from a surface-level friendship forged by circumstance and proximity, which was exacerbated by the secrets each of them harbored regarding their involvement in Vanessa’s questionable choices and ultimate disappearance.
Overall, I’d give it a 3 out of 5 stars.
*I received a copy of this book from the publisher via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

I really enjoyed Jilly Gagnon's first title, All Dressed Up, and was expecting to like this one as well - I generally love locked-room style mysteries and friends with secrets. But there were a lot of issues with this novel, lots of things that didn't really make sense to me. You always put aside your disbelief a little bit for fiction, but this was just asking too much. This young women did not like each other at all - they were awful to each other and I can't believe they were ever good enough friends to spend a week together, let alone come back together 15 years after a "tragic accident" after not talking all that time. Also, the resolution was entirely forced. I don't want to give spoilers but the explanation made absolutely no sense to me and seemed completely and utterly out of character. The villain was clearly projected even though all of the characters were awful and unlikeable. I enjoy books with clever characters I love to hate, like Gone Girl, but none of these ladies were Amy Dunne. I will definitely give Gagnon's next title a try as I really enjoyed her first one, but although I was able to finish it, this title fell flat for me.

This book was an interesting read. The story itself kept me invested but I wish there wasn’t so much description at times. I found myself kinda skimming over those parts so I could get to when the “action” started. Also I would’ve liked if the chapters were shorter but that is just a personal thing. Overall I’ll be looking out for more of this authors books.

This was a great mystery/thriller with an unpredictable ending. I am certain it will be a hit when it is published. very well written and fast-paced.
Thank you random house publishing and Netgalley for the ARC.

15 years ago Vanessa disappeared during a college friends weekend at her grandparents vineyard. Each of her girlfriends has something to hide in connection with her murder? accidental death? disappearance? Screenwriter Emily wants out of her tedious sitcom script writer's job and thinks that Vanessa's disappearance could be the story that she could tell; if only slightly fictionalized. To this end, she convinces the remaining "girls" to return to the vineyard to reconnect and share their thoughts about Vanessa's disappearance/demise so that she can glean details to add to her screenplay. Little does Emily know that getting this group of women together will have murderous results. Emily tries out different scenes in her head to fill in the blanks about that long ago weekend which can sometimes be confusing for the reader. Are we revisiting actual events or is Emily getting creative? What is her ultimate goal for this weekend? Always the peacekeeper among the girlfriends, has Emily finally decided to put herself first? and at what cost? Subplots about various toxic relationships between the women and their shared history are related in flashback chapters. All and all, an engaging read, however I found the ending to be a bit predictable.

Many thanks to Random House publishing and NetGalley for providing me with this little gem of an ARC. Sharply observant of dysfunctional female friendship drama. A trope that I am here for all day. Cleverly done in both present and past time. Interspersed with Emily's screenplay it was just delicious. If you liked Run Time, you will ADORE this. It publishes in September. Can't wait to physically hold this one. Read it on a non work or school night. You will turn the pages until dawn to discover what really happened to Vanessa.

A thriller involving friends getting together at the scene of a crime that happened many years ago. I loved the play on words in the title. The story was told as part story and part of a screen play the narrator was writing. The story alternating between the two. It was a slow burn at first setting up the creepy scene of caves and caverns built into an oceanside cliff that held the barrels of wine for the winery and of introducing the characters and their relationships. As the story progressed, we learned more about the night the women experienced many years ago. The story built in intensity as we learned what exactly happened and why. There are twists you won't see coming. Overall, an entertaining thriller with a cast of characters you will love to hate.