368 pages
Published July 2024 by Random House Publishing Group - Ballentine/Bantam
Source: my copy courtesy of the publisher, through Netgalley, in exchange for an honest review
Publisher's Summary:
Gia and Abby have been friends since childhood, forever bonded by the tragedy that unfolded in Greece when they were eighteen. Now thirty, heiress Gia is back in Greece with her shiny new husband, entertaining glamorous guests with champagne under the hot Mediterranean sun, while bookish Abby is working fourteen-hour days as an attorney. When Gia invites Abby on an all-expenses-paid trip to Sweden to celebrate her birthday, Abby’s thrilled to reconnect.
But on the day of her flight, Abby receives an ominous email that threatens to unearth the skeletons of her past, and when she and Gia’s brother, Benny, arrive in Sweden, Gia isn’t there. Worried, Abby and Benny fly to Greece, where they find Gia’s beachfront estate eerily deserted, the sole clue to her whereabouts the manuscript she penned, detailing the events leading up to her disappearance. Gia’s narrative reveals the dark truth about her provocative new marriage and the dirty secrets of their seductive guests, a story almost too scandalous to be believed. But the pages end abruptly, leaving more questions than answers.
How much of Gia’s story is true? Where is she now? And will Abby find her before it’s too late?
My Thoughts:
The publisher reached out to me in December about this one, preapproving me to read it in Netgalley and I was intrigued enough to download it. But let's be honest, that cover would have drawn me to it if I'd come across it in December and I'm surprised I didn't "pick it up" immediately for a break from the winter weather.
But Ladykiller a summer read, through and through, the kind of book to devour on the beach or curled up in a vacation rental. While there's plenty of darkness in this one, it's not the kind of book that you'll get emotionally involved in to the point where your mood is impacted.
Wood takes readers back and forth between Abby's point of view (present day and memories of how she and Gia came to be friends and how she came to be haded to Sweden) and Gia's latest manuscript. We're well into the book before we know why we're reading Gia's manuscript and not getting Gia's present day point of view and that's part of what makes this book work. There are a lot of twists and turns, a lot of questions about what happened in the past, a lot of red herrings, and a lot of setups that turn out to be not what you were expecting.
In other reviews, I found that a lot of people don't like the ending of this one; it's ambiguous and leaves a lot of things open. Me? I really liked that - you know how often I say that I prefer books that don't tie everything up with a bow in the end. But there were things sprinkled throughout that book that didn't work as well for me. I struggled believing that someone as smart as Gia would be so gullible on multiple occasions. Near the end there's a reveal that didn't work for me, either. I felt like those involved would have caught on much more quickly. Will it stand the test of time or become a massive hit? Probably not. But it gave me plenty to like and was just the kind of book I like to pick up this time of year.
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