**Disclaimer: I received a free early access copy of Reckless Girls by Rachel Hawkins through NetGalley in exchange for an honest review. Thank you to NetGalley and to the publisher for this opportunity.
Reckless Girls by Rachel Hawkins is an adult mystery-thriller novel. It’s about a young woman named Lux who goes with her boyfriend and two women who have hired them as guides to a remote island nearby Hawaii. Things quickly intensify there. It is set to be published on January 4th, 2022. I rated it four stars on Goodreads.
Here’s the summary from Goodreads:
From the New York Times bestselling author of The Wife Upstairs comes a deliciously wicked gothic suspense, set on an isolated Pacific island with a dark history, for fans of Lucy Foley and Ruth Ware.
When Lux McAllister and her boyfriend, Nico, are hired to sail two women to a remote island in the South Pacific, it seems like the opportunity of a lifetime. Stuck in a dead-end job in Hawaii, and longing to travel the world after a family tragedy, Lux is eager to climb on board The Susannah and set out on an adventure. She’s also quick to bond with their passengers, college best friends Brittany and Amma. The two women say they want to travel off the beaten path. But like Lux, they may have other reasons to be seeking an escape.
Shimmering on the horizon after days at sea, Meroe Island is every bit the paradise the foursome expects, despite a mysterious history of shipwrecks, cannibalism, and even rumors of murder. But what they don’t expect is to discover another boat already anchored off Meroe’s sandy beaches. The owners of the Azure Sky, Jake and Eliza, are a true golden couple: gorgeous, laidback, and if their sleek catamaran and well-stocked bar are any indication, rich. Now a party of six, the new friends settle in to experience life on an exotic island, and the serenity of being completely off the grid. Lux hasn’t felt like she truly belonged anywhere in years, yet here on Meroe, with these fellow free spirits, she finally has a sense of peace.
But with the arrival of a skeevy stranger sailing alone in pursuit of a darker kind of good time, the balance of the group is disrupted. Soon, cracks begin to emerge: it seems that Brittany and Amma haven’t been completely honest with Lux about their pasts––and perhaps not even with each other. And though Jake and Eliza seem like the perfect pair, the rocky history of their relationship begins to resurface, and their reasons for sailing to Meroe might not be as innocent as they first appeared.
When it becomes clear that the group is even more cut off from civilization than they initially thought, it starts to feel like the island itself is closing in on them. And when one person goes missing, and another turns up dead, Lux begins to wonder if any of them are going to make it off the island alive.
Rachel Hawkins is definitely one of my favourite authors, and I was really glad to get to read this. I had a lot of fun with her first adult mystery, and you can find my review for it here. Reckless Girls did not disappoint. It wasn’t a perfect five star read from me, but I still had so much fun reading it!
The story is well developed, and I appreciated how you get snippets of all the different characters. Most of the novel is in Lux’s perspective, but you also get flashbacks in her life, and flashbacks in the perspectives of the other characters that she encounters. It all helps guide you to the ultimate conclusion of the book and helps give you a fuller picture of the story.
Lux felt like a very real character. You can understand where she’s coming from and you can relate to how she’s feeling. Her interactions with the other characters were realistic, and you can understand why she might feel doubt in her relationship with her boyfriend or how she relates to the other characters at varying points in the story.
The atmosphere of this novel was really well done as well. I liked how the tensions slowly increased like we were the frog put into the gradually getting hotter water. Things get more and more unsettling as the novel goes on, and it quickly becomes clear that you don’t really know who you can trust. I really loved that.
Overall, it was an excellent read and if you like a good thriller, I definitely think you should check this novel out when it publishes in early 2022.
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