My rating: 🌟🌟🌟 (3 stars)
Publisher: St Martin's Press (August 2019)
The opening of the story won points with me for the suspenseful set up. It was very atmospheric and definitely set a great tone. Also, the set up is quite the game of chess as pawns manipulate and demonstrate varying degrees of power in some seriously ruthless endeavours. Through flashbacks, the story is related to explain how we got to the opening scene and it's clear that the mains of this story are being manipulated & their character flaws & vices capitalized upon by someone and they don't realize it. They were all awful so there's little sympathy even when they are treated harshly by another in the group.
