A brilliant opener that hooks us in as a bride jumps over a cliff during her wedding party – so it’s sad that this wimpers out about a third of the way in into a by-the-numbers tale of female besties/rivalry, undying love, lies, deception and a ‘who can you trust?’ narrative so quickly. The l-o-o-o-n-g flashback life-story of Evie from the age of 5 onwards gets increasingly operatic and my heart sank every time we returned to it.

Throw in grammatical errors mixing up ‘I’ and ‘me’, ‘she’ and ‘her’ (though I was reading an ARC so hopefully these will be ironed out before the book is published), and some confusion over when an important event happened (it’s given as 4 years ago, 6 years ago, and 9 years ago) which changes the age of our protagonists: I think, on balance, 4 is used most often which makes them 22-23, which feels about right for their emotional (im)maturity.

I was hooked at the start but this increasingly felt like a chore to read and I found myself skimming through to the expected ending – a bit trashy, a bit YA, if you read a lot in this genre, you’ll have seen it all before: 2.5 stars.