Hard review for me to write. I was super excited about reading this, as I currently live in Portland, OR and am loving the wineries out here. I love thrillers and locked room books - so why not put those together? For some reason, this book was just not it. I really just didn't feel connected to any of the characters or the plot. The book dragged for me until about the 80% mark - I finally felt like we were getting some action and truly there really wasn't that much. The screenplay aspect of the book (or mixed media) was what set the book apart and kept it interesting to me.

I finished this book only because I was genuinely confused, not intrigued or trying to figure out who did it, but fully confused. Maybe that was the point of the book, the psychological twisty who is really the bad guy? But it went too far into muddy waters and I didn't like it personally.

Reading Between the Wines book review #118/115(met goal in Sept!) for 2023:
Rating: 3 🍷🍷🍷
Book: Scenes of the Crime
Author: Jilly Gagnon
Available Now!!

Sipping thoughts: Typical group of frenemies that have secrets that they are keeping from each other. Lies told over years of friendship. A disappearance. No one is who they seem. I think this was just okay. I didn’t care too much for the ending.

Cheers and thank you to @RandomHousePublishingGroup and @Netgalley for an advanced copy of @ScenesoftheCrime.

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The story revolves around five friends in college who are staying at a winery owned by the grandparents of two of the friends. One of the granddaughters, Vanessa, vanishes.

Fifteen years later, Emily Fischer, a screenwriter, thinks she sees Vanessa and prompts her to suggest a reunion for closure at the same winery. Emily hopes to write Vanessa's story. Two in the group of friends had remained in touch while the others had grown apart. As Emily tries to draw the group into discussing Vanessa, it becomes apparent that each one has secrets.

Vanessa's story is revealed in the form of a screenplay between the chapters, depicting what could have happened.

I found it difficult to connect with any of the characters because they were all so vengeful and guarded.d. It was hard to see that there was ever a friendship between any of them. There was a nice twist in the end.

I received an advanced reader's copy and voluntarily read and reviewed this book.

A group of friends gets together for a weekend of fun. The problem being that they really aren’t very friend like - in actuality are quite toxic - and Vanessa disappears. Forward 15 year and the remaining crew gets back together - as toxic as ever. It was not a pleasant read - just too much negativity and toxicity. Thanks to NetGalley for the opportunity to read.

Thank you to netgalley and random house for a copy of the boom to read for an honest review. I had a hard time connecting with any characters. I felt it was like a mean girls reunion with dangerous situations. You may like it so still check it out!

Emily was stunned to see a woman who looked exactly like Vanessa in the coffee shop, knowing it was impossible. Vanessa had disappeared fifteen year earlier, while their friend group was visiting Brittany’s grandparents’ winery. Feeling a need to reconnect with the others, and wanting to fully understand the reason for Vanessa’s disappearance, Emily called Brittany and asked her to arrange a weekend at the winery. She was certain she could get the truth out of the other women.

I’m conflicted about this book. I didn’t like the screenplay inserts, and I felt Emily, in particular, was playing to the camera. I liked the psychological horror, and the mystery surrounding Vanessa’s disappearance, but I didn’t really like any of the characters and so didn’t really care what happened to them.

This mystery has a group of friends who revisit a spot where they spent spring break many years ago, and one of them disappeared. Only, they aren't really friends. And the girl who disappeared was spotted recently by one of them.

They story is mostly told from Emily's point of view - she describes events but also is writing a script about what happened that she hopes to sell to Hollywood. This method of story telling was fun, and also made me mentally say "Wait--what?" a few times. None of the characters are super likeable, but the mystery was good!

Emily, Brittany, Paige, and Lydia come together for a girl's weekend full of wine and memories. But Emily has an underlying agenda: Figure out what happened to their friend Veronica that fateful night years ago. Not only does she want answers, she knows it will be a perfect story to write for her screenplay. Thank you, NetGalley, for an advanced copy of this suspenseful read!

I've read and enjoyed a previous book by Jilly Gagnon. This one not so much. Scenes Of The Crime just didn't grab my attention. I tried to force my way through the book but gave up a third of the way through. I didn't care much for the characters and honestly, I was a little bored.

I voluntarily read and reviewed an advanced copy of this book that I received from NetGalley. All thoughts and opinions are my own.

Scenes of the Crime was interesting. I liked the premise. 4 friends getting together at secluded winery to reminisce about their missing friend. It had all the makings of a good thriller for me.

I thought it was cool to the author toggled between present day and the script Emily was writing, but a little bit confusing at the same time. It made it hard to trust the characters and the information I was getting.I still don’t really understand what truly happened in the end. We get an answer/explanation but can we trust it. Emily says something to us the reader as the books ends and I think, maybe we really don’t know and can we really believe what she is telling us. Maybe that was the point, for us the reader to not really know or trust what Emily or any of the characters say.

The author did a great job writing characters that I really didn’t like. The friendships were toxic and the character terrible to each other. I really felt that and the author did a great job conveying their surface level and dysfunctional relationships.

The book held my attention and I was invested in finding out the truth of what happened to Vanessa.

Thank you to NetGalley, Jilly Gagnon, and the publisher for this book in exchange for my honest review and opinion.

Scenes of the Crime was a fun, twisty thriller. I really liked reading the screenplay bits of the book, it made it all the more intriguing and kept me guessing! This is one of those thrillers you will want to curl up with this fall/winter! I look forward to reading more from this author.

Hard NO on this one. Flat, stereotyped characters with no personality other than snarky comments and yelling. A narrator who is not unreliable so much as she is untrustworthy. Weird scripted scenes that may be telling the story or may be just out of the narrator's head. A tedious repetitive first half that took me a month to get through, then a third of the book with characters confessing for no real reason and then many more pages of the characters re-confessing to others. The tired and ridiculous premise of four women who absolutely dislike each other coming together in a remote location to think about another woman who they also disliked. A confrontation scene that played out with two hysterical unreasonable women having a sort of catfight - I had to doublecheck if the author was a man, it was so immature and misogynistic. In the end, the idea that the main incident had happened 15 years ago felt unrealistic, I would have believed it more if it had been just a five year time period.

Many thanks to NetGalley for the ARC in exchange for an honest review. Unfortunately this one was really not for me and I cannot recommend it.

3.25 stars
Scenes of the Crime by Jilly Gagnon is a passable mystery involving five long time women friends who gather to discover the truth about their mutual friend’s disappearance 15 years ago.
Set in Oregon, five college friends meet at a beautiful winery for a reunion weekend. Their personalities are very different, but they share the one terrible night in the past when their girlfriend Vanessa disappeared. Emily, now a Hollywood screenwriter, wants to solve the mystery and use the story to revitalize her stagnant career.
The plot is reasonable, and the writing is a bit overly wordy, but fresh and youthful in tone. Unfortunately, the characters really deep-sixed this novel for me. They were all vapid, unlikeable, and spoke in mean-girl dialogue in the past scenes as well as present day. It was hard for me to care about any of them, and their guilt or role in Vanessa’s death.
One creative touch I liked was the use of screenplay excerpts inserted in between the chapters, breaking up the mean girl narrative and giving the reader greater insight into main character Emily. At times, though, these interjections seemed to complicate or detract from the plot’s forward movement.
There is an audience for this book, as the premise is a good one, but I could not connect with the characters or the mystery of Vanessa’s fate.

Thanks to Bantam Books/Random House and NetGalley for the ARC. This is my honest opinion.

Scenes of the Crime by Jilly Gagnon

#netgalley published 9/5/23
#mystery

Emily, a screen writer sees a doppelganger of a person she thought got swept out to sea 15 years ago. She has a very hazy memory of the night it happened. Emily decides to initiate a replica weekend of the day Vanessa died. What really happened. Did that weekend divide the 5 girl friend group that probably never belonged together in the first place? Can Emily figure out what really happened that night that Vanessa disappeared?

I had read another book by JG and liked it so I decided to give this one a try too. It just didn't grab me as well as All Dressed Up did. I'm not sure if I am going to try another book by this author or not. I just didn't want to keep picking this book up. Sorry. This was not a win for me. But if the story sounds good, give it a try.

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#booknerdsbookreview

⭐️⭐️💫
This one was… well, it was.
The first half of the book dragged for me. The second half went fast but left me feeling… meh. None of the characters were developed well enough to make me care and the payoff was just so odd and didn’t feel like any of it made any sort of sense. The conclusion was a huge stretch and was just behind my personal zone of willing disbelief.

Four college friends are connected by the disappearance of their closest friend fifteen years ago. Emily is a show writer looking for new material and a change. When she invites them all back to the scene of the disappearance under the guise of a reunion, a story starts to pull together. Was the friend’s disappearance really an accident? What hidden secrets does each person hold?

This was a cleverly written novel. It is a mixture of present day reality and present and past scenes that Emily is writing for her new show. The style builds the mystery as you tread the line between fact and fiction. It is a very easy read, but do pay attention as you often find yourself revisiting the question of story versus reality. I enjoyed this one. 4 stars.

Review based on a digital Advanced Reader’s Copy provided by Random House Publishing Group/Bantam and NetGalley. Thank you!

I very much so enjoyed this book! I found it to be enticing right from the get go. The thriller aspect kept me hooked and I enjoyed the character POVs. I didn’t guess the ending which was a nice surprise!

A gorgeously atmospheric setting combined with my favorite premise, a toxic friend group with a magnetic queen bee at its center -- who happens to have been missing for years, since their last retreat. I loved everything about this brilliantly written thriller, from the mindblowing secrets the friends are keeping from each other to the screenplay-within-a-book written by the main character, a screenwriter attempting to solve her best friend's disappearance and presumed death by pulling the group back together for another (very sinister!) getaway. The twists were incredibly clever, the friendships dark and complex, and the narrator's voice intimate and witty.

I did not like the writing style that was used. Portions of the book were written as Emilie's screen play which was distracting and annoyed me.

I didn't find any of the characters to be likable. I viewed them as whiny narcissists. The plot was good even though it dragged on and felt redundant in places.

I received this galley from NetGalley.