How to Kill Your Best Friend by Lexie Elliott
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
Georgie, Lissa and Bronwyn have been best friends since their days together on their college swim team.
In the years following school, their friendship group, which includes a few male swimmers, have remained close, frequently taking swimming holidays together.
Lissa and her new husband recently purchased a beautiful island resort, somewhere in the South Pacific, and the group takes full advantage of the lovely waters there.
On their most recent holiday at the resort, Georgie chose not to attend. She’s now living in New York and it would have been an extremely long trip. That’s the excuse she gave at least. She did have some other reasons for not wanting to go.
It’s on this occasion that Lissa, taking an unimaginable solo night swim in the dangerous waters of Kanu Cove, drowns. Her body assumed swept out to sea, is never recovered. Fisherman in the area did spot the body at one point, but before they could recover her, she slid back under the dark surface.
Georgie is out of sorts from the very start. She arrives late, she didn’t get the memo on the dress code, and most importantly, she cannot believe that Lissa would have made that swim at night, alone, voluntarily.
Bronwyn is out of sorts as well, but for different reasons. She’s receiving threatening messages, she’s distracted, constantly looking over her shoulder, but why?
The group is set to stay at the floundering resort for a long weekend and a heck of a lot happens during that time. There’s creatures surfacing from the depths, mysterious occurrences, flaired tempers, entirely too much booze and a storm of epic proportions. Will any of them get off the island alive?
How to Kill Your Best Friend is the second novel I have read from Lexie Elliott. I absolutely love her writing style.
While I did feel this was a bit of a slow burn, I didn’t enjoy it any less because of that. I love the way Elliott builds her characters and the way she allows us to see inside their heads; learn about their pasts and motivations.
I generally enjoy competition tropes, or tropes where characters are members of a team or club. This definitely had that dynamic, even though the women are well past school age. There’s still something about the interactions of people that compete, or train together, that I just find so relatable.
It’s like when you are in that kind of relationship with a group of people, it can feel like you are closer to them than anyone else in the world. There’s an assumption that you know everything about each other, but everyone’s keeping secrets, aren’t they?
Additionally, I loved the setting. The close to abandoned resort. The fact that the characters were stuck there. No matter how uncomfortable they got, or how much they wanted to leave, that wasn’t an option.
Secluded locations allow for the tension to really build and Elliott captured that claustrophobic feeling so well here. Especially towards the end, as the weather picked up, so did the stakes.
Overall, I thought this was a really well executed story. It was dramatic and tense, I had a lot of fun with it!
Thank you so much to the publisher, Berkley Books, for providing me with a copy to read and review. I am a huge Lexie Elliott fan and will continue to pick up anything else she writes.
