Review: 'She Left' by Stacie Grey

Imagine surviving, accidentally, by having walked away too soon, a massacre of your best friends who you also kind of hated. Twenty years later, you end up stack at another cabin, having to figure out once and for all what happened and having to face your own guilt. Meet She Left, which was more fun than I expected it to be. Thanks to Poisoned Pen Press and NetGalley for providing me with a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review. My apologies for the delay!

Pub. Date: 5/14/2024
Publisher: Poisoned Pen Press

Twenty years ago, she survived. This time she may not be so lucky.

On the night that changed everything, Amy Brewer walked out of a house party, trudging angrily away from the friends who made her feel like she didn't belong. Within the next hour, all five of those friends would be dead.

The Memorial Day Massacre, as it came to be called, rocked their small California community and Amy—the girl who had walked away just in time—couldn't escape the media circus...or the guilt.

Twenty years later, ten people with connections to the crime have been invited to a remote cliffside house by a journalist looking to do a story on the murders. But the group quickly learns the event is not what it seems. As a storm closes in and guests begin to die, Amy realizes there is someone in the house who knows more than they admit about what happened that night long ago… and they will stop at nothing to protect their secrets.

Amy left her friends in a cabin after a prank of theirs went too far. An hour later, all her friends are dead. Twenty years later, Amy goes by her middle name, Therese, and works for the FBI. She has been haunted by the death of her friends, never quite resolving her own issues with that night. Now, a journalist has invited her to a fancy cabin, planning to write an in-depth piece on the mystery. This is Therese's chance to face her past and clear herself of the guilt of having walked away. But nothing is as it seems when she arrives. Nine other people are there, both familiar and new, who all have links to the victims of the murder or the investigation that followed, but the journalist is nowhere to be found. When they wake up without their phones or car keys, and with a storm closing in, it is time to figure out what is going on now and what happened twenty years ago. I really enjoyed Therese as a main character. When we first encounter her teenage self in the Prologue, which shows her walking away from her friends, I hoped we wouldn't get continuous flashbacks and we didn't! Instead, we track an adult Therese as she tries to use her FBI experience to get to the bottom of what, exactly, is going on and why they have all been invited to the cabin. Therese feels like an adult and, while at times she is perhaps a little too calm, I felt like I understood her actions and her expertise made sense. The characters around it are a little vaguer, in the sense that they represent the expected/trope characters quite strongly. I had some sense of where the plot was going to go but did not feel disappointed at having those expectations met.

This is my first time reading Stacie Grey and I can definitely see myself picking up more books by her in the future. Like I said above, I was very glad that she stuck to a single timeline and not playing with the idea that maybe Amy/Therese is/was the murderer. Don't get me wrong, I like unreliable narrators, but only if it makes sense and is earned, and it would not have made sense in the context of this novel. Instead, Grey plays with her narrators. Most of She Left is narrated through Therese's POV, but every once in a while this is interrupted by a brief chapter from the perspective, or perhaps rather about, one of the other guests. They are not headed by the name of the character but rather by the "character they play", if that makes sense? I liked getting these extra little insights and they definitely added to the atmosphere. There is also a lot of fun mudslinging and back-and-forths between the characters once the bodies start dropping, with everyone seemingly accusing everyone else. This atmosphere was added to by the growing storm around them, adding a nice "running against the clock"-vibe to the whole story. Again, while the ending did not surprise me, I really enjoyed the journey there.

I give this novel...

4 Universes!

For what it was, She Left surprised me with how intrigued I was by it. It was on my mind in between reading spurts and coming off a really bad thriller, this reminded me how much fun the genre can be when an author knows how to keep their plot under control.