Down by the Water

A group of women are travelling for a long weekend at an AirBnB in Scotland. These old university friends are going to a hen party organized by Georgie and they are all to be bridesmaids at her wedding.

The remote location is seemingly ideal for some pre-wedding ‘bonding time’.

Naturally, all is not as it seems. The lives they live are not what they outwardly project and what they present is not representative of the cracked mirror of their reality.

There is the strained bonhomie, the ‘in vino veritas’ moments that expose old jealousies, resentments and flashes of enmity and facades that are all too ready to crumble. All of which is not in any way helped by a blizzard of Ketamine.

The bottles of champagne, prosecco and spirits soon dwindle, once they are trapped at the house by a fallen tree. Without any means to get further food and booze, they resort to raiding the overgrown kitchen garden and, of course, the wine cellar. They search the outbuildings and one of their number, Bea, discovers a very revealing and disturbing diary which she can’t resist reading. There’s an incident with an adder and another with the estate managers dogs. It all gets a little ‘Lord of the Flies’, as the facades start to crumble and the various protagonists have their ‘truth’ revealed.

This is not a particularly likable bunch. However, the author hasn’t given us one-dimensional cyphers, but an involving dynamic and story-line that keeps your interest as it evolves. As a former boarder at an all-male school, the characters assuming their roles from their time at university certainly resonated with me. I still have close friends from my old school and we definitely partake of that dance when we meet.

A different and well-crafted take on the ‘friends with dark secrets’ genre and definitely worth picking up.