The Lost Night

*yaaaaaaaawwwwnnn*<br /><br />This book is reminiscent of a really bad Lifetime movie starring a bad actress from a 90's drama that you end up watching on a Sunday afternoon because you can't find the remote. <br /><br />The Lost Night lost me about halfway through when I realized it was turning into the typical whodunnit only without the who.<br /><br />I had a suspicion of who the killer was but kept dismissing the thoughts in hopes of a less obvious outcome. Although I guessed the killer, I hadn't yet figured out the why until it was revealed.<br /><br />The reveal was painfully cliché in it's execution with the guilty party giving a long, detailed and convoluted account of the implausible chain of events leading up to and following the murder. I mean this scene goes on and on and on and becomes more ridiculous by the page.<br /><br />The lead protagonist, Lindsay, is an unbearably annoying character with the mental fortitude of a teenager rather than a woman in her 30's. <br /><br />The writing is very wordy and I found myself skimming through paragraphs of relentless dialogue.<br /><br />2.5 Stars rounded up to 3 for effort<br /><br /><br />I was provided an ARC of this book by NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

An okay psychological thriller that sees Lindsay start to question her best friend's suicide, ten years after the event. She has lost touch with her other friends from the time they all spent partying, drinking and generally running amok. Edie's death was deemed a suicide as she was seemingly depressed after a string of bad things had passed through her life. Lindsay slowly starts to get back in touch with her old friends, trying to remember what actually happened on that fateful night, a night that Lindsay was blacked out drunk. Was it really a suicide? Or was Edie murdered? And did Lindsay herself know more about what happened that night? When new evidence starts to emerge it leaves Lindsay with a cold feeling, as all the evidence points at her.<br /><br />I enjoyed this book well enough, without ever being totally enthralled. It did tend to get a bit bogged down at times, yet the ending was good. I never would have picked what actually happened in a million years. A good novel for a rainy weekend.<br /><br />My thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for an ARC in exchange for an honest review.

The main character is yet another insufferably puerile thirty-three year old woman trying to determine her role in a tragedy that occurred ten years earlier among her hipster friends in the Bushwick neighborhood of Brooklyn, NY. This is a protracted tale that is predictable and mundane. Maybe I’m just too old to appreciate this sort of thing.

How reliable are our memories, particularly of a traumatic time? Andrea Bartz's mystery, <b> <i>The Lost Night</i> </b>, effectively explores that question.<br /><br />In 2009, just as the U.S. economy was collapsing, a group of friends in their early 20s spend their days partying, drinking hard, listening and playing music, and falling in and out of hookups and relationships. At the center of the group is Edie—beautiful, mercurial, pulling all into her web. Everyone wanted to be noticed by her, wanted her approval.<br /><br />Lately Edie had seemed a bit troubled; she and her boyfriend had broken up even though they kept living together. But everyone was still stunned when one night, while a massive concert and party was going on up on the roof of their building, Edie was found dead, gun in her hand, suicide note on her computer.<br /><br />Ten years later, Lindsay, the outsider of the group, reconnects with Edie’s old roommate, Sarah, when Sarah moves back to town. Sarah is the one who found her, and at the time insisted there was no way Edie could’ve killed herself.<br /><br />When Sarah tells Lindsay that contrary to what she has believed for 10 years, Lindsay wasn’t with them at the concert prior to Edie's being found, it shakes her to her core. Lindsay becomes obsessed with figuring out what she did that night, and when she finds evidence that she might have seen Edie just before she killed herself, she worries that perhaps Sarah was right—maybe Edie's death wasn't a suicide. But might she have had a role somehow?<br /><br />"Distressed, we construct realities that feel just as real as the world around us. Whose brain had concocted a new version of that night—mine or Sarah's?"<br /><br />This was a very compelling mystery which captures the arrogant invincibility we feel when we’re younger and the unreliability of memories. I was surprised with how things resolved themselves (I usually don't trust any character in a mystery or thriller because I'm so convinced everyone is responsible, but for some reason I didn't suspect this person at all.)<br /><br /><b> <i>The Lost Night</i> </b> is well written, albeit a little melodramatic. I couldn’t stop reading it, and devoured the whole book in a few hours, and not just because I had insomnia.<br /><br />Check out my list of the best books I read in 2019 at <a href="https://itseithersadnessoreuphoria.blogspot.com/2020/01/the-best-books-i-read-in-2019.html" target="_blank" rel="nofollow noopener">https://itseithersadnessoreuphoria.blogspot.com/2020/01/the-best-books-i-read-in-2019.html</a>. <br /><br />Check out my list of the best books of the decade at <a href="https://itseithersadnessoreuphoria.blogspot.com/2020/01/my-favorite-books-of-decade.html" target="”_blank”" rel="nofollow noopener">https://itseithersadnessoreuphoria.blogspot.com/2020/01/my-favorite-books-of-decade.html</a>.<br /><br />See all of my reviews at <a href="http://itseithersadnessoreuphoria.blogspot.com" target="_blank" rel="nofollow noopener">itseithersadnessoreuphoria.blogspot.com</a>.<br /><br />Follow me on Instagram at <a href="https://www.instagram.com/the.bookishworld.of.yrralh/" target="”_blank”" rel="nofollow noopener"> https://www.instagram.com/the.bookishworld.of.yrralh/.</a>

Close to the 10 year anniversary of the suicide of twenty-three year old Edie, her former roommate and former best friend, have lunch together, after not seeing each other for almost 10 years. Sarah, the roommate, and Lindsay, the best friend, had been together with Edie's ex boyfriend, Alex, smoking, drinking, and partying, that night. As Sarah and Lindsay reminisced about Edie and the night of her suicide, their memories are different and Sarah admits that she was convinced that Edie was murdered and went to great lengths to dig deeper into what happened that night. <br /><br />This starts Lindsay, one of the most unreliable narrators you could hope to meet, due to her blackout drunken episodes, on a mission to find out what really happened that night. Lindsay even wonders if she killed Edie since she was planning an ugly best friend break up with her and that night was one of her nights of drinking into a blackout stupor. As she begins to gather information into the death of Edie, Lindsay enlists the help of her current best friends Tessa and Damien, <br /><br />Edie had a magnetic personality and a beautiful head of red hair, fair skin, freckles, and was always the center of attention. Edie also dropped people like rocks and made a lot of enemies in her short 23 year old life. The group of friends lived in a huge rambling, cobbled together apartment building with little privacy, rarely used locks, and people coming and going at all hours of the night, as the denizens partied like the "hipsters" they were. Edie had just been told that her parents were losing her childhood home and would not be able to help her with her grad school tuition. She had also just had an upsetting medical problem requiring being rushed to the emergency room and she'd broken up with her boyfriend, Alex. Even so, two of her roommates, Sarah and Keven (the only one who knew the real reason for the medical emergency) could not believe Edie was suicidal. <br /><br />Still, life goes on and everyone has put the cause Edie's death in the past, including her unstable psychiatrist mother. But once Sarah and Lindsay have their lunch together 10 years later, Lindsay begins to dig into the past. She had idolized Edie at one time and she had idolized that time in her life. Since that time, despite success at her job and her two best friends, she knows she is stuck accepting the fleeting physical love of men, knowing she will never be good enough to even rate being a girlfriend. Her life and her mindset, in some ways, hasn't progressed much past her wild and loose ways of her early twenties. And she had so many black out drunken gaps in her memory that the past was scratching at her mind, waiting to be remembered even if through pictures, videos, and her friends' often conflicting memories. <br /><br />The story can seem to go on and on and on as the past is dissected, stories are compared, pictures and videos are picked apart, and Lindsay promises worried friends that she will drop her "investigation". But Lindsay's digging starts disturbing some people, known and unknown and the more Lindsey learns, the more likely she could be implicating herself in the death of Edie. I was interested in the story the entire time I was reading it although very few of the people seemed really likable to me except Tessa and Damien. Then Lindsey digs too deep, allows others to know just how deep she's dug, and all hell breaks loose, not once but twice. I was happy with how the book ended and despite the moment I considered correctly the person who may have harmed Edie, I quickly dismissed that person, so that made the ending even more interesting for me. <br /><br />Thank you to Crown Publishing and NetGalley for this ARC.

<b>3.5 Stars...rounded up!</b><br /><br /><blockquote> <i>Standing four feet closer to heaven and looking at the sidewalk eight emptied floors below. Maybe today's the day I'll Jump</i> </blockquote><br /><br />Lindsay is a thirty something living in New York. She has great friends, enjoys her job and has an overall good life. However she has a few secrets and one of them includes what happened to her best friend ten years ago. Edie was found dead inside her apartment with a suicide note. However, when an opportunity comes up to reconnect with her old group of friends, Lindsay's curiosity causes her to doubt what really happened to Edie.<br /><br />Lindsay starts to investigate the case, talking to Edie's friends, Mom and ex boyfriends. Lindsay has only hazy memories but then she finds some grainy videos and emails that may be more telling then she remembered. While she's going through these memories, her past starts to haunt her once again. I think the biggest question this book asked was "Do you keep your friends close but enemies closer?"<br /><br />This is Andrea Bartz debut novel and I'm glad I got the chance to read it! It's definitely more of a suspense than a thriller. This is also definitely more of a slow burn until you get to the end when it all really hits you. The read the last 100 pages in one sitting. Overall it's a who dunnit suspense and if you like those kinds of books then this one may be for you!<br /><br />For me, this had a very slow start. I like when books pull me in immediately. I was definitely interested in what happened to Edie, however I had guessed a few theories and ultimately one of them was what happened. It was a little more obvious then other suspense novels that I've read. I felt like the first 150 pages or so we're a lot of the same story - Lindsay talking to the same people and rehashing the situation. I think a few more situations or incidents could have been added to keep the reader more interested.<br /><br />Overall for a debut, I think it was good. I will pick up Bartz's next book because I think the wow potential is there!<br /><br />Thank you to Crown Publishing for my ARC of this book.

This book is so much fun and is one of the most original and unpredictable thrillers I’ve read in a long time. I received an advanced manuscript of The Lost Night and was kept on my toes until the last page. I love a good thriller but can normally spot the twists from a few chapters away—not with this book! I’ve been describing The Lost Night to my friends (after telling them that they should read it) as a mix between Gossip Girl and Gone Girl; aka all the of entertaining social dynamics of a juicy drama mixed with the tantalizing roller-coaster plot of a page-turning whodunit. I’ll be reading this novel again!

This book is a feminist masterpiece. From its 20-something female protagonist looking for something real in a sea of f*** boys, to the 30-something version who feels like commitment is still too much to ask for, The Lost Night jumps into the complex tangle of relationships and love. It's no surprise that the most meaningful, powerful, and often disturbing relationships in the book are between Lindsay and her then and now-female friends. Edie, Linday's charismatic but cruel Brooklyn bestie, even manages to pull her back into their shared world 10 years after Edie has mysteriously died. I got to read an advanced manuscript of this book, and I'm still thinking back on it, weeks after reading. If you like books that both champion and question intense female friendships, this book is definitely for you. <br /><br />

I read The Lost Night over a weekend, and for the last 50 or so pages, couldn't put it down. The author creates an immersive, cinematic world of 2009-era Brooklyn, inhabiting a series of characters in a way that feels deeply candid and real. It's an excellent thriller (I didn't manage to guess the killer until the big reveal), but it's the internal monologues of each character that drew me in most. Highly recommend!

I had the joy of reading an early draft of The Lost Night, and love the world it creates. The dialogue especially blew me away. Seeing how the characters gush to their friends about a new boy they laid eyes on at a party, then send stream-of-consciousness emails to each other about their fears — I've rarely read something so spot on. It felt like someone had taken my own conversations from my early twenties, all those late-night vulnerable musings, and somehow rendered them even more real. <br /><br />Can't say enough about how well the book captures a certain place and era. And the plot twists definitely kept me wondering! Really excited to read the final version.