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If you have been a passenger of the Never Mandy review train for a while you should be familiar with my inability to sugarcoat things. It’s not a bad problem when a book is mostly decent because I can find some bits of kind to turn it into a compliment sandwich kind of review. The terrible reading experiences are the ones that sink my battleship. I want to find some good, but the overwhelming negative reading experience wins out and the darkness pours from soul. I do respect the hell out of people that have the courage to step up to the writing table, but I don’t always like the content that they produce.

A woman that had walked out on her life so many years ago with a secret gets invited to a weekend away in the middle of nowhere with a past life bestie and a mix of known and barely known others.

The cover and title went together perfectly making this book stand out from the rest on the clearance shelf. That is pretty much all the nice I can scrape together on this one. The plot and characters were terrible, the whodunit was obvious from the beginning and the dirty secret from the past was poorly teased throughout most of the book. My biggest gripe had to do with the lead character and how she was written. I cannot handle it when female characters are written as cliché pass out when the going gets tough kind of women. Especially when their inner dialogue contradicts that behavior and makes them sounds like two completely different people because the gap between was not bridged properly. The reader needs to sense a little of the self-doubt in the character's actions or see a touch of the outer strength reflected in the inner struggle. Without either the character falls flat and the point of following them along their mediocre plot path is lost.

Two stars to a book that should have been left in the dark woods.