This book was sent to Traveling With T for review consideration.

After Nightfall

Summary: Beware of friends with secrets…

Imagine your closest friend utterly betraying you. Years later, when she seeks forgiveness, you invite her to your engagement party as a gesture of reconciliation. But seething hostilities rise to the surface, ruining everyone’s evening. After an awful night, your friend’s battered, lifeless body is found at the bottom of a rocky cliff.

Newly engaged Marissa Parlette is living this nightmare. She should be celebrating her upcoming wedding, but she can’t shake the image of her friend lying dead on the beach. Did she fall? Was she pushed? Or did she take a purposeful step into darkness? Desperate for answers, Marissa digs deep into the events of the party. But what she remembers happening after nightfall now carries sinister implications: the ugly sniping, the clandestine meetings, the drunken flirtations. The more she investigates, the more she questions everything she thought she knew about her friends, the man she once trusted, and even herself.

Bestselling author A. J. Banner keeps readers on a razor-sharp edge in this intricately plotted novel of psychological suspense…in which nothing is as it seems.

 

Traveling With T’s Thoughts:

I think I should not have read this book right after finishing Believe Me and Baby Teeth. It’s not that these books are similar exactly- just I think my brain was exhausted.

I absolutely LOVED the cover. It just kept catching my eye and really set my expectations about this book.

However, the book did not meet my expectations after seeing the cover.

The first of the book really set things up- the dinner party was AWKWARD. When your best friend from years ago comes back into your life, a lot of times people are eager to rekindle that relationship. I mean your bestie knows a lot of stuff, right? But when your bestie relationship has the stink of a frenemy- type relationship- a strong undercurrent of competition- well….

For me, this book had many threads tying together to form the mystery and maybe it was thread too many. It just felt like the book had lofty goals and it didn’t quite meet them.

Again, I’m def in the minority over not loving this book. Maybe I should have read it a couple or so books after reading Baby Teeth and Believe Me in a short time period. Or maybe you can’t love every book all your friends love.

Bottom line: While there are parts of this book I did like (especially the exploration of a friendship gone wrong that was attempting to get back on track), overall, I didn’t LOVE it. With this being my first A.J. Banner book, I’m not writing her off- I may check out some previous books or even try to re-read this one in a few months to see if my thoughts have changed.

 

*This book was sent to Traveling With T for review consideration and all thoughts and opinions are mine alone.*

 

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Happy Reading and Bookishly Yours,

T @ Traveling With T