Please note that I received this book via NetGalley. This did not affect my rating or review.
I ended up giving this one 4.5 stars and rounding it up to 5 stars. The only reason why I didn’t think it was a 5 star favorite read for me was that 1) I doubt I would re-read this again and 2) the omnipotent narrator in between chapters started to grate towards the end. I just wanted to find out what happened or was going to end. The characters were great, I ended up hoping that they all would survive. You may think that some of them are annoying and don’t like them, but then it swings back around again as the story goes on. I loved how this ended. This was a really great mystery/thriller and would love to read Lucy Clarke again in the future.
“One of the Girls” follows Lexi and 5 other women as they travel to a Greek island to celebrate Lexi’s upcoming wedding. It’s a hen-weekend and Lexi’s so-called best friend/maid of honor, Bella is determine that it will be a weekend that no one forgets. Bella’s girlfriend Fen though feels separate from Bella for some unknown reason and is struggling with terrible memories from when she was on the island years earlier. Lexi’s other long time friend Robyn hopes that she can handle being away from her young son. A former client of Lexi’s, Ana, keeps telling herself that she should not have come. And Lexi’s soon to be sister in law is still grieving a terrible loss and feels awkward around the other women. But the important thing is that we know going in that someone is going to die and they will be wearing red.
So the book unravels each of these women’s pasts and presents slowly. The book jumps back and forth between all of them as we follow the countdown to the final night of the hen weekend and the death that is coming. You start to wonder who it is and why it happened, and Clarke gives you several reasons why it could be any one of them. That’s the fun part. In essence this is kind of a locked room mystery, but it’s a Greek villa that is the setting for the death.
The flow was great I thought. I was initially worried following 6 women was going to take away from the overall plot, but it didn’t. Everything was smooth between points of view and I honestly wanted to stay with each of the characters because there was so much going on.
The setting of the Greek island (fictional) that the women were on felt magical, but you know it has some darkness to it because of what is troubling Fen. And you have the omnipotent narrator doing it’s countdown to death thing and musing about who is going to die.
The ending was very well done. I didn’t see it coming. I do have to say that parts of the book were predictable, but not in a bad way. I liked how things were set up and how you get there in the end.
