Reviewed by Emma Crowley
It was a celebration to die for . . .
What happened on holiday was supposed to stay on holiday - but that was before a body was found . . .
Socialite Lucinda Oliver planned a lavish celebration for her fortieth birthday - a weekend escape at an Irish coastal town with her sister Stella and her closest friends. The weekend was to end with a blow-out party and a special announcement, one Lucinda had been dropping hints about for weeks.
But before Lucinda could reveal her secret, she went missing. And now, six months later, her car has been found submerged in the Atlantic Ocean.
Devastated, Stella decides to gather Lucinda's friends once more, in that same coastal town - the first time they've all been together since her disappearance. But soon she starts to suspect that one of the group knows the truth about Lucinda's accident.
Which one of them is lying? Stella vows to find out, discovering that what happened to her sister links back to another birthday celebration, ten years ago...
Many thanks to Hachette Ireland for my copy of The Birthday Weekend to review and to Sharon for having my review on the blog.
Zoe Miller is back with a bang with her fantastic new page turner, The Birthday Weekend. Once you pick up this creepy, menacing book packed full of twists and turns you’ll find it very difficult to leave it out of your hands. It really is a one or two sitting kind of read and I had to stay up until I reached the final page to discover just what happened to the enigmatic Lucinda Oliver on that fateful birthday weekend in West Kerry.
I will say that there are a lot of characters to become familiar with and in the first half of the book I did find it challenging to keep track of who was who, how they were connected to each other and who they were dating or interacting with etc. But once I got this clear in my head, I felt free to revel in the story that was unfolding and towards the end I understood how essential everyone was to the overall plot.
Zoe Miller takes her readers on a twisted journey packed full of secrets, suspicion and intrigue where all the characters are hiding something especially from that fateful weekend. But also, the past holds a key to why certain people feel bitter towards one another and you soon come to realise that not everyone is as they seem. Not one character can be underestimated whether they play a major or minor role within the book. Keep your wits about you. Watch every little thing that everyone says or does and even then, you will be surprised by the final revelations and conclusions. I certainly was as I had no clue as to what exactly had happened and why and that’s the way a good thriller should be. Ok, I did begin to piece things together as we neared the end but that was only because the clues were becoming more apparent but there were so many red herrings thrown in throughout the story that one minute you think so and so is responsible and then with a turn of the page a different event or revelation occurs which has you doubting everything you had thought. It’s great to be kept guessing until the last possible moment and that’s what happened for me here.
The book opens with a newspaper article detailing a discovery at a property. A few days earlier in the area a car had been taken from the sea near to the location where socialite Lucinda Oliver’s car had plunged from a cliff six months earlier. The news is devastating for Stella, Lucinda’s sister, who had clinging to the last vestiges of hope that her sister would come back to her. But now that the car has been discovered Stella has a strong urge to find out what exactly happened six months previously at the birthday weekend Lucinda had gathered her friends together for at a property named, The Lookout, near to the coastal village of Wolf Cove.
As the reader gets to know Stella, you can tell that she is deep in grief but also that there is a sense of guilt emanating from her. That the last time she saw Lucinda there had been a fight and she has never been able to reconcile with this fact. She is haunted that there has been no clarity as to what happened to Lucinda and the more she looks back on that weekend the more she begins to think were the invited guests harbouring secrets, acting suspiciously or was this all just an awful tragedy?
Stella has been receiving anonymous messages and spiteful comments on social media saying she is responsible for the events that occurred. Could someone from that weekend be targeting her and for what reason? Surely, she has nothing to hide? As the guards prepare to recover the car from the sea Stella invites all Lucinda’s friends who were there on that significant weekend back to the Lookout. It’s a memorial of sorts, a chance to say goodbye but also an opportunity for Stella to dig a little deeper. But will she be comfortable with what she finds out and is she prepared for what is about to unfold?
Within the first few chapters a lot of characters are introduced and their backstory is supplied over the course of the book but the impatient part of me wanted answers immediately to the umpteen questions that began to form in my mind. I knew I wasn’t going to get them instantly and that I would have to be patient and bide my time but that only served to make merace through the pages even quicker than I already had been. At times, I did question the relevance of some of the details especially when the story moved back to another weekend ten years previously which took place in Santorini. But Zoe Miller knew exactly what she was doing and had everything so brilliantly plotted out leading her readers in many different directions only to reach dead ends and then you were back to the start again. I did at some stage think what was the point in this? Was the Santorini element adding anything to the story set in the present? It was so frustrating - in a good way - all the teasers being dropped and I longed to reach into the pages of the book and grab a character and say, hey stop being so evasive and just spill the beans please.
Caz Costello is a freelance hair and makeup artist and one of Lucinda’s closest friends. She knows things about Lucinda that would shock Stella. Images of that weekend haunt her and hold her in their grip but now with the discovery of the car anything she tried to hide is about to come rushing to the fore. Eddie has tried to pretend that the weekend at the Lookout never happened. His business has crashed. His relationship with Sasha is over yet Eddie is hiding something big and if he doesn’t accept Stella’s invitation it will definitely look suspect. Maisie is married to Keith with two children and it’s evident old hurts and jealousies are still very much at the forefront of her mind so much so that these will lead her in a heap of trouble and she jumps to unnecessary conclusions. For Janet the weekend she wishes to forget created huge scars in her and Aaron’s relationship which are difficult or perhaps impossible to heal. Britt, a long time family friend of Stella and Lucinda’s who resides in the area, is there to welcome them all back but with a lot of unfinished business and resentment surrounding this gathering only time will tell will anyone emerge unscathed and the big question will the truth surrounding Lucinda’s disappearance be revealed?
Considering we learn about Lucinda from the perspective of Stella and the other characters we certainly got to know a lot about her and to be honest I wasn’t all that enamoured by her. She seemed to hold everyone in her spell and they were fearful of breaking any confidences even if it was necessary to do so. She seemed to have this magnetic forcefield around her packed full of glamour and intrigue that everyone else orbited around. They were charmed by her and beholden to her and even more so in the wake of her disappearance. She always portrayed a bubbly, vivacious, ultra-sparkling façade to the world but as Stella digs deeper and starts questioning things, she learns all was not as it seemed in Lucinda’s world. That she had many layers to her and not all of them what she would have liked the world to see. She was an enigma and a chameleon and as I raced towards the conclusion this only became more apparent and as home truths and disclosures poured forth I was torn in multiple directions believing one person over another only to have it upturned with a word or sentence and I was kicking myself that I hadn’t paid closer attention to a certain someone.
Zoe Miller has written an excellent, gripping read that is well told and keeps you guessing throughout. I don’t read in this genre all that often and I would say I am selective when I do so but no doubt about it I made the right decision to read this one and I highly recommend it.
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