Close to the 10 year anniversary of the suicide of twenty-three year old Edie, her former roommate and former best friend, have lunch together, after not seeing each other for almost 10 years. Sarah, the roommate, and Lindsay, the best friend, had been together with Edie's ex boyfriend, Alex, smoking, drinking, and partying, that night. As Sarah and Lindsay reminisced about Edie and the night of her suicide, their memories are different and Sarah admits that she was convinced that Edie was murdered and went to great lengths to dig deeper into what happened that night.
This starts Lindsay, one of the most unreliable narrators you could hope to meet, due to her blackout drunken episodes, on a mission to find out what really happened that night. Lindsay even wonders if she killed Edie since she was planning an ugly best friend break up with her and that night was one of her nights of drinking into a blackout stupor. As she begins to gather information into the death of Edie, Lindsay enlists the help of her current best friends Tessa and Damien,
Edie had a magnetic personality and a beautiful head of red hair, fair skin, freckles, and was always the center of attention. Edie also dropped people like rocks and made a lot of enemies in her short 23 year old life. The group of friends lived in a huge rambling, cobbled together apartment building with little privacy, rarely used locks, and people coming and going at all hours of the night, as the denizens partied like the "hipsters" they were. Edie had just been told that her parents were losing her childhood home and would not be able to help her with her grad school tuition. She had also just had an upsetting medical problem requiring being rushed to the emergency room and she'd broken up with her boyfriend, Alex. Even so, two of her roommates, Sarah and Keven (the only one who knew the real reason for the medical emergency) could not believe Edie was suicidal.
Still, life goes on and everyone has put the cause Edie's death in the past, including her unstable psychiatrist mother. But once Sarah and Lindsay have their lunch together 10 years later, Lindsay begins to dig into the past. She had idolized Edie at one time and she had idolized that time in her life. Since that time, despite success at her job and her two best friends, she knows she is stuck accepting the fleeting physical love of men, knowing she will never be good enough to even rate being a girlfriend. Her life and her mindset, in some ways, hasn't progressed much past her wild and loose ways of her early twenties. And she had so many black out drunken gaps in her memory that the past was scratching at her mind, waiting to be remembered even if through pictures, videos, and her friends' often conflicting memories.
The story can seem to go on and on and on as the past is dissected, stories are compared, pictures and videos are picked apart, and Lindsay promises worried friends that she will drop her "investigation". But Lindsay's digging starts disturbing some people, known and unknown and the more Lindsey learns, the more likely she could be implicating herself in the death of Edie. I was interested in the story the entire time I was reading it although very few of the people seemed really likable to me except Tessa and Damien. Then Lindsey digs too deep, allows others to know just how deep she's dug, and all hell breaks loose, not once but twice. I was happy with how the book ended and despite the moment I considered correctly the person who may have harmed Edie, I quickly dismissed that person, so that made the ending even more interesting for me.
Thank you to Crown Publishing and NetGalley for this ARC.