🌟🌟🌟💫

A very mixed bag for this reader — first, the good (which is actually very good). This book starts with an interesting premise, featuring a detailed set of characters, each with their own POV, in a gorgeous island setting. The story is somewhat centered on a fascinating and horrifying true-life historical context from long-ago, tied to atrocities of the Portuguese Inquisition.

In this read we will encounter a group of friends in their late twenties, reunited ten years after a camping trip to the beautiful Azores which resulted in the unsolved murder of one of their party.

The story starts off with a flourish and is very engrossing, right out of the gate, for this reader, heading towards a solid five-star read. However the pace unfortunately falters by the mid-point and the story, once highly entertaining, began to complicate and bog down with too many dangling clues, left unresolved for too long, kicked around by characters who by this point have become mostly uninteresting.

The ending, when it came, was a twist that was largely predictable, over-the-top, and formulaic.

Worth a read for lovers of suspenseful mysteries in exotic locales — this book although not living up to its initial promise in the eyes of this reader, has received some terrific reviews.

A great big thank you to Netgalley, the author, and the publisher for an ARC of this book. All thoughts presented are my own.