Play Book Tag discussion

Human remains are found in Salten on the Sussex coast. Three former school friends, Thea, Fatima, and Isa, receive a text from the fourth, Kate, saying "I need you". All three return to Salton where they had attended boarding school 17 years earlier and where Kate still lives in the sinking deteriorating Old Mill where she and her father, an art professor at the boarding school, lived. There for the first time in all the years, the 4 of them face what happened when they were 15: their expulsion mid-term and Kate's father Ambrose's disappearance.

In so many ways this is classic Ruth Ware: a setting that is melancholy, even creepy, the very gothic Old Mill, the nod to classic mystery plots, here that teen behavior and poor decisions leading to tragedy. Ware mentioned in an interview I read that she's long loved boarding school stories and mysteries, have read so many as a child, but that this plot owe more from the film The Dead Poets Society than to a classic mystery plot. Ware does give it a modern twist - there is a very deep exploration of the parent/childe relationship and loyalty, how far a parent will go to protect a child, how far someone would go to save someone they loved. But more than a gothic mystery plot, it's a tragedy.

Yet ... I am a touch disatisfied. It feels too drawn out, too labored pulling the pieces to together that are needed to turn a classic plot into something fresh and different. I could not suspend my disbelief sufficiently as the pages went by, easy reading though it was. Plus I don't really enjoy these academia based plots where teen friends hide or get away with someting awful that was the result of poor decisions, only to have it all to the surface (usually quite literally) when they are approaching middle-age and no one has seen or talked to each other in years.

This is Ware's 3rd published work, stronger in many ways than her first 2, but far from the skill shown in The Death of Mrs. Westaway and The Turn of the Key.

Steeplechase -Secrets - 17x