Becky's Great Book Reviews We Were Never Friends by Kaira Rouda

Kaira Rouda's thriller We Were Never Friends has a solid, if familiar, premise: old friends are stuck in a location due to a weather event; questions are swirling about how a fellow sorority sister died when they were young; now a dead body shows up. Yes, please.

A group of sorority sisters, now in their forties, are gathering to celebrate the engagement of two of their kids. The setting is a desert oasis that belongs to one of the women and her husband, Ryan. The catch is that when the women arrive, they realize Ryan has had it decorated almost exactly like the location where one of their sorority sister died back in college. That sorority sister also seems to be making ghostly appearances at their gathering.

The characters are stereotyped, with the expected mean girls versus nice girls. But stereotypes exist for a reason and it was easy to swallow. The revelations in the novel were also somewhat non-revelatory, but the trope of this thriller upheld the plot points.

All in all, We Were Never Friends was a quick, fun, readable thriller. This book might not take up too much space in my head, but it held my attention to the end. I give Kaira Rouda's new one two and a half stars out of five.