She Lies in Wait by Gytha Lodge
Random House Publishing Group, January 2019
General Fiction (Adult), Mystery & Thrillers
Review copy via NetGalley

Six friends. One killer. Who do you trust? A teen girl is missing after a night of partying; thirty years later, the discovery of her body reopens a cold case in an absorbing novel featuring a small-town cop determined to finally get to the truth—for fans of Tana French and Kate Atkinson.

On a scorching July night in 1983, a group of teenagers goes camping in the forest. Bright and brilliant, they are destined for great things, and the youngest of the group—Aurora Jackson—is delighted to be allowed to tag along. The evening starts like any other—they drink, they dance, they fight, they kiss. Some of them slip off into the woods in pairs, others are left jealous and heartbroken. But by morning, Aurora has disappeared. Her friends claim that she was safe the last time they saw her, right before she went to sleep. An exhaustive investigation is launched, but no trace of the teenager is ever found.

Thirty years later, Aurora’s body is unearthed in a hideaway that only the six friends knew about, and Jonah Sheens is put in charge of solving the long-cold case. Back in 1983, as a young cop in their small town, he had known the teenagers—including Aurora—personally, even before taking part in the search. Now he’s determined to finally get to the truth of what happened that night. Sheens’s investigation brings the members of the camping party back to the forest, where they will be confronted once again with the events that left one of them dead, and all of them profoundly changed forever.
This searing, psychologically captivating novel marks the arrival of a dazzling new talent, and the start of a new series featuring Detective Chief Inspector Jonah Sheens.

I've always been a fan of the crime shows from anything like Law & Order to Murder She Wrote and I figure myself a pretty keen judge of character and can figure out angles of mysteries fairly quickly. This novel is definitely one that kept me guessing even though the obvious fact is that the murderer had to be one of the six friends who were camping with Aurora when she had died. The fact that this was a cold case adds a whole new level of fact checking thirty years later and determining what a motive could be to murder the ethereal young beauty that Aurora was.

There are many characters to set up this mystery whose traits were revealed slowly throughout the novel which helped draw out the suspense. There were nuances of foul play between all the friends, and then add in those who knew the friends and weave in possible corruption of the police to a cover up at a higher level at the school that all sets up a captivating web of leads to follow.

 I appreciated the level of attention given to all the suspects and enjoyed learning more about the detectives themselves, setting up background for another novel in the author's future featuring the group headed by Jonah Sheens (which is assumed will occur based upon the Goodreads' subtitle). The setting in Scotland adds another check mark of a cool setting to the overall effort that was very well done for a debut writer and this one even made me tear up!




I turned off commenting long ago on the blog but I welcome comments at the Facebook page here.