Play Book Tag discussion

I'm feeling lazy, so for the synopsis I'm copying a blurb: This intense novel follows a middle-aged man as he contends with a past he has never much thought about - until his closest childhood friends return with a vengeance, one of them from the grave, another maddeningly present. Tony Webster thought he'd left all this behind as he built a life for himself, and by now his marriage and family and career have fallen into an amicable divorce and retirement. But he is then presented with a mysterious legacy that obliges him to reconsider a variety of things he thought he'd understood all along, and to revise his estimation of his own nature and place in the world.

It started well, rather intriguing, and mostly continued to be interesting. Then the ending got confusing, obviously deliberately, and I felt it was a bit contrived to keep the reader guessing too long. I guessed at the ending, then discarded my guess as a red herring was tossed in my path, and then found my original guess vindicated at the end.

But I found it rather anti-climactic, not as big as the build-up made it to be, and I didn't like the characters very much. It had a similar feel to Donna Tartt's The Secret History, kind of a lite version of it. Overall it was an okay read, not one I would pick up on my own, but needing it for a challenge I'm glad it was short!