I hate to say this, but I had really high hopes for this one and sadly, it didn’t meet them. There were moments that I really liked, and others that either fell flat or dragged for too long.

The book begins with a scream and a dead body – gotta love that! We start off from Jade’s point of view as she runs up to see why someone is screaming and she finds her friends standing outside the room of Seraphine – the elderly grandmother of her friend Darcy and the owner of the French chateau they are all spending time in. By the end of the chapter, we learn that Seraphine has been stabbed to death and Jade isn’t exactly upset about her death. The author then takes us back two days before the murder and we get a look at what led up to the murder.

Seraphine invited the four friends – Seraphine’s granddaughter Darcy, Seraphine’s housekeeper’s granddaughter Arabelle, along with Vix and Jade to spend some time in Provence, France at her Chateau. Darcy and Arabelle grew up together and have been friends forever, and then Darcy met Vix and Jade while they were all studying abroad. The four of them used to spend a lot of time at the chateau while in college, and it’s nice to be able to get back together – or so they think.

The book alternates through several character’s first-person points of view and I think this may have been one of the things that bogged the book down for me – there were far too many points of view in my opinion. We heard from all four women: Darcy – a married woman with two kids & Seraphine’s granddaughter, Jade – Darcy’s friend, a fitness enthusiast with teen children and a workaholic husband. Jade is also Jewish and someone in Provence (where the story takes place) turned her family over to the Nazi’s, sparing only her grandfather – so her connection to this area is very personal and one of the main plot points (and honestly one of the most interesting parts of the book). We also have Vix, a lesbian who is a breast cancer survivor and recently broke up with her girlfriend – Seraphine also has a strong bond with her for some reason, and finally Arabelle – a young woman whose grandmother was Seraphine’s maid for many years. Arabelle and Darcy grew up together after Arabelle’s parents were killed and she moved into the Chateau to live with her grandmother. Arabelle is a famous chef and is huge on Instagram.

We also hear from Seraphine (before her murder) Raph (the gardener) and Sylvie, Arabelle’s grandmother. So seven different points of view…

Each of them is a suspect in Seraphine’s murder, and none of them knows who to trust. There’s also a very brief side story of an unknown Instagram handle sending threatening messages to the four women. This doesn’t last long and in the end, the reasoning behind it seemed really insignificant. I felt like it was built up way too much in the synopsis and in the first few chapters, then it completely disappears from the narrative until it’s resolved much later. By the time it came back up, I had forgotten all about it.

As I typically do., I pegged the culprit about 1/4 or 1/2 way into the book, so there was no real twist for me.

In the end, I thought this one was just okay. I felt it dragged a lot, and I didn’t really care about any of the characters enough for there to be any real impact one way or another. This is definitely a slow burn, and I’d probably recommend it to someone who is looking for a slower paced mystery. Unfortunately for me, the burn was barely a smolder.