“The floor creaked down the hall, the kind of sound her mom would have told her was settling. Cass found it to have the opposite effect.”

Frankie’s twin sister Sofia disappeared years ago. Now, her body has finally been discovered inside a tree in an old abandoned house. Frankie reconnects with her old friends Poppy and Cass and new friend Marya to investigate what happened to her sister. Since the body doesn’t provide any additional clues, it’s not clear why Frankie didn’t investigate Sofia’s disappearance sooner, but whatever.

Frankie and Marya continue working at their shop, but Poppy and Cass apparently put their lives on hold for the weeks and months it takes them to investigate. There’s no reason for the investigation to take months. Everything in this book could have happened over the course of a week or two. In fact, it would have made more sense for the villain to try to kill them sooner rather than patiently waiting for months for no apparent reason.

The four of them don’t even do much investigating, instead spending all their time reconnecting with each other. It’s a slow-paced novel. There are many chapters where nothing really happens. There’s a lot of filler. Except for the opening chapter, we don’t see the haunted house until near the half-way point.

There was a weird scene in which Cass was surprised to see how much her brother had grown up since the last time she saw him. The scene is weird because it comes months after she’d returned to town. Was she too busy doing nothing to visit her brother in all that time?

By my count, we get six or seven different point-of-view characters. Often, it’s not immediately clear whose point of view we’re getting for several paragraphs, which is a bit frustrating. At first, it was hard to tell the characters apart because they all have similar personalities (the four main characters are all young women who have anger-management issues, see ghosts, and are attracted to other women), but I had an easier time telling them apart by the time I got to the half-way point.

Sofia’s boyfriend Lucas is presented as a villain, but it’s not entirely clear why. We’re told he’s bad, but we never seen him do anything bad other than being a bit of a jerk sometimes. The flashback scene in which Poppy punches him for something his friend said honestly makes her look like a bigger jerk than him. I guess the moral to the story is we should commit physical assault anytime someone hurts our feelings.

It’s not really clear why the four friends think Lucas killed Sofia. They think he was the last person to see her alive, but all of them were also there when Sofia disappeared. It seems like they’re jealous of him for being Sofia’s boyfriend. Unless I read it wrong, it seems like Sofia put a love spell on Lucas, so the relationship wasn’t even consensual on his part. He’s more of a victim, yet he’s still presented as the villain.

The four friends even stalk him for weeks even though he never does anything suspicious. They never apologize for their horrendous behavior towards him. When they finally get around to talking to him, they’re able to figure things out. Why didn’t they just talk to him sooner?

Also, the four of them keep secrets from each other for no good reason. Granted, they don’t fully trust each other at first, but after they’re all friends again, them continuing to keep secrets from each other didn’t make sense. It was just a way to drag the novel out longer and provide some minor drama when they do finally find out they’ve been keeping things from each other.

The person who did it is introduced suddenly at the end, so readers aren’t given a chance to figure it out for themselves.

I’ve been complaining a lot about this book, but I did like the writing style. Very vivid. Also, I liked the chapters from Finder’s point of view. Finder lives in an alternate dimension that I found interesting. The parts involving ghosts were scary. I think this book could have been much improved if we got less filler and a shorter timeframe.