CBR 13 # 17 In A Dark, Dark Wood by Ruth Ware

It's one of those books where the "mysterious events of the past" are mysterious only because the narrator isn't telling you about it.  

Leonora, 26 years old is a crime author and lives a solitary and lonely life.  Then, she receives an email from a woman she does not know, inviting her to a "hen party" for a friend she has not spoken to for a long time.  But she goes.  This hen party is for the wedding of Leonora's childhood friend Clare.  A wedding which she was not invited to.  It's held in a modern glass house in the middle on the woods with four other of the bride-to-be's friends.  Of course, there are mysterious happenings, secrets unravelled, and maybe a little murder?  Okay, you know there's a murder since the book opens in the present time then Leonora is in the hospital with injuries and the police have told her that somebody has died.  But she does not remember what happened.  So it goes back and forth between the present time and flashbacks to the hen party events.

You have to suspend a lot of disbelief with these random thrillers/ psychological mysteries with big twists.  But the way the characters act are so far from how a normal person would act that I just can't.  The heroine is, to put it bluntly, a bit pathetic.  She is hung up on the first and only boyfriend that she had when she was 16.  And the main incident that led to her sad life could have been avoided by a single text.  And that's also the incident that led to the whole series of events years later.  And the motivations are so questionable.  She's just not a very compelling lead character to me.

Par for course in these kinds of books, it is thankfully short and quick.  Of course you want to hurry up and find then end to the mystery.  But you know what?  I didn't even care enough to take guesses and try to figure stuff out like I usually do when reading these kinds of books.  It was a bit boring.  I didn't like it.  Oh, and contrary to marketing, it was not scary at all and the woods weren't really a huge part of the story.  Just for a little bit of atmosphere.  It could have happened at a remote farmhouse or something like that.