What Lies in the Woods by Kate Alice Marshall. Audiobook review.

Slowly, the tension is mounting and I was impatient to get back to my read and test if my theories were correct!

Synopsis

They were eleven when they sent a killer to prison. They were heroes . . . but they were liars.

Naomi Shaw used to believe in magic. Twenty-two years ago, she and her two best friends, Cassidy and Olivia, spent the summer roaming the woods, imagining a world of ceremony and wonder. They called it the Goddess Game. The summer ended suddenly when Naomi was attacked. Miraculously, she survived her seventeen stab wounds and lived to identify the man who had hurt her. The girls’ testimony put away a serial killer, wanted for murdering six women. They were heroes.

And they were liars.

For decades, the friends have kept a secret worth killing for. But now Olivia wants to tell, and Naomi sets out to find out what really happened in the woods―no matter how dangerous the truth turns out to be

Audiobook Review

Narrator: Karissa Vacker, perfect as ever.

4,5 stars

I guess listening to many mysteries these past months has me better at the guessing game! I guessed many plot twists but…not the biggest one.

I won’t tell much about the plot as this is a mystery.

Let’s just say that the book is about three friends Naomi, Olivia and Cassie whose summer ended up in drama when they were eleven.

Naomi was stabbed seventeen times.

She survived miraculously and identified her attacker putting a serial killer in prison. But was he her attacker? Truly?

Naomi has always been the girl from the wrong side of the track with a drunk father and a mother who left them. Since, the accident she’s been even more prickly.

Twenty two years later, as the serial killer died in prison, her friend Liv , the gentle and fragile Liv wants “to tell the truth”. She wants to tell what really happened in the woods.

But Cass is not ready to have Liv give away their secret. The repercussion on their lives could be dramatic.

Naomi and Cass ask for Liv to wait for one day except… Liv dies the day after. A suicide it seems.

I won’t tell more about the plot.

All along we have the story told from Naomi’s POV. And as she has forgotten huge chunks of what happened all those years ago, she is not the most reliable narrator.

Every character we were introduced to, I was trying to guess if he was a friend or a foe. If he or she was who he said he was or if he had a secret to hide.

Slowly, the tension is mounting and I was impatient to get back to my read and test if my theories were correct!

If I found some parts of “who did it” and “who is who”, the biggest twist came as a surprise even if, by the end, I had an inkling on what would happen. But it was smart and gripping so I will certainly read other books from Kate Alice Marshall!

Thanks for reading.