🎧 Reviewed by LD | Rating: 3.6/5 | Steam: 🔥 | Standalone
⚠️ This is a full spoiler review. If you haven’t read The Girls Trip yet — go read it first. We’ll be here when you’re done.
The Opening
Three women who met online, never in person, finally decide to do it. Ditch their lives for a few days. Go completely off-grid at a wilderness resort. Tell absolutely nobody where they’re going. Great premise. Love it. I’m in.
And then a lot of things happen. A lot of things. Some of them are genuinely interesting. Some of them I am still not entirely sure I understood. But I kept listening, and that has to count for something.
The Full Story — Spoilers Included
Meet the Girls
Ash is a mom of three teenagers with a marriage that looks fine from the outside and feels completely wrong underneath. Her husband Wade is a specific kind of husband — the one who does something passive-aggressive every time she leaves town. Dumps all her clothes out of the closet because she was “taking up too much space.” Drains her charity’s bank account when she’s not watching. He shows up at this resort with her brother-in-law and tells her she’s spent two years in a relationship with her friends instead of him, and now it’s time to go home. That he has to be the one to tell her what she’s doing wrong. I have thoughts about Wade.
Caro is an anesthesiologist who is drowning in guilt. She lost a patient — a mother during childbirth. The baby survived. The mom didn’t. And she can’t let go of the question of whether she could have done something differently. She’s also carrying a secret from her husband Dan that she’s been lying to him about for a while. Caro has a lot going on.
Hope is an actress. Famous enough that people recognize her, and her friends are protective of her because of it. She’s warm, she’s generous, and she’s running a plan that none of us are fully briefed on at the start.
The Resort
Eden National Park. Wilderness lodge. The actual manager, a guy named Colby, is notably absent. A resort worker named Paige is covering for him and acting as manager. She watches these three women arrive, immediately clocks that one of them is famous, and calculates exactly what that means for her. Paige is bitter about money and power in ways that feel like they mean something. Throughout the book she’s also writing letters to someone named Eve. We don’t know who Eve is yet.
The Camping Neighbors
Once they hit the trail, they come across cold water and decide to camp at site 6 and take a dip. They’re in the water, not exactly fully dressed, when a group of guys shows up. It’s awkward. The guys end up camping at site 7 right beside them — they aren’t going anywhere. One of them, Spencer, is someone Caro knew back in the day. Friends with benefits. She thought it was mutual. During a poker game where the winner gets to ask anyone a secret and they have to answer, Spencer admits that he was actually in love with her the whole time. She had no idea.
Tony, his friend, makes Ash uncomfortable from the first moment. He has a temper. He’s the kind of presence that puts you on alert. Tony is going to end up dead later. Found naked. The book does not fully explain this to my satisfaction.
The Flash Flood
Caro can’t sleep. She gets up in the night and notices the water is much higher than it should be. Flash flood. She panics, wakes Ash, and realizes Hope is not in their camp — she’s apparently over at the guys’ tent for reasons we can only guess. No time. The sandbar is shrinking. They scramble across the river and start climbing. Ash slips and knocks Caro off center, Caro falls and grabs onto something, Hope grabs onto Caro to slow her fall. They land on a ledge below. Caro makes it. Hope is gone.
They survive the night. They get airlifted out. Search and rescue goes looking. A viral post goes up asking people to help find Hope Hanover. No answers.
The Phones and the Plan
Back at the resort, they find Hope’s trailer and a locked safety box inside it. Their phones are in there. But Hope’s phone — and a burner phone — are missing.
And then things start to unravel backward.
Before the trip, Hope sent them each a certified handwritten letter telling them they were being watched. Someone had been monitoring all three of them, possibly for years. She gave them burner phones so they could speak freely. She warned them that their regular phones were compromised.
The plan, which they apparently agreed to but the reader is not fully let in on, was for Hope to disappear during the trip and use herself as bait to flush out whoever had been stalking her. The girls trip was chosen on purpose — Hope’s very first role was as an uncredited extra in a movie filmed at Eden. She knew the location meant something to whoever was watching her.
Here’s where I’m going to be honest: I am not fully understanding why this was the plan. Like, I get the logic on paper, but the whole luring-it-out setup from the beginning doesn’t totally click for me. But we’re here, so.
Ash’s Marriage
Meanwhile, Ash is getting a very unwelcome look at her own life. She finds out there is almost no money left in her nonprofit’s account. The only people with access are her, Wade, and their treasurer. Wade shows up at the resort expecting her to just leave with him. She confronts him in the airstream about the money. He refuses to engage. And something clicks for her in that moment — no matter what she does, it is never going to be enough. By the end of the book, Wade has moved out. That resolution I understood completely.
Caro’s Grief and Secret
Caro eventually says the thing out loud: she can’t have children, and she’s been lying to Dan about it while they were trying. The guilt about her patient and the guilt about that secret have been sitting on her together the whole time. Hope, it turns out, froze her eggs when she was younger. She offers them to Caro. It’s an unexpectedly quiet and kind moment inside an otherwise chaotic book.
Paige and Eve
Paige has been writing letters to Eve all book long. Eve was her sister. Eve had dated a man named Ty, and when she tried to leave him, he killed her. He hid her body in the canyon. The older body that Ash and Caro spotted during the flood — that was Eve. Paige has been at this resort all summer on purpose.
I understand what the book was going for with this. But the Paige and Eve connection felt strange to me too, like an extra layer that didn’t quite settle into the rest of the story the way it was supposed to.
The Ghost Town
Ash and Caro keep getting anonymous texts claiming to be Hope, eventually telling them to follow a pin to a ghost town. They go. Inside a church they find a body on the floor — it’s Paige, and there is gasoline everywhere. Caro’s father Henry appears at the door — he has memory issues and had somehow Ubered his way there, which is a whole other thread that I also didn’t understand the need for. Dan, Caro’s husband, shows up behind Henry. Paige cries out that he killed her sister. It’s not clear who she means.
And then the doorway darkens again. A man in a ski mask, holding Hope with a knife to her throat.
He pulls off the mask. He tells them he recognizes all three of them. He’s been in their phones, their computers, their houses. He tells Ash her daughters are beautiful. It’s Ty. The food truck guy from the resort. He charges, slits at Hope’s throat, Hope drops the flare gun, Ash grabs it and shoots him.
Ty had been stalking Hope since she was an uncredited extra in a movie filmed at Eden. He killed Eve when she tried to leave him. He’d been running remote surveillance on all three women across their devices for years. A food truck guy with apparently extraordinary technical skills who also just happened to be working the resort they chose. The coincidence is doing a lot of heavy lifting. And you’d have to be really really good with tech, not just someone who knows stuff about computers, to be able to pull off this almost invisible stalking.
Hope survives. The throat wound is serious but not fatal. And that’s where we leave her.
The Steam Rating Breakdown
🔥 / 5 — Zero. The Spencer and Caro history gets referenced, there’s an emotionally charged poker night, and then nothing. This is a thriller through and through.
The Ending — Satisfied or Disappointed?
Satisfied with a confused asterisk. The personal threads land well — Ash getting out of a bad marriage, Caro releasing her guilt, Hope surviving and offering Caro something real. Those feel right.
But the thriller mechanics were busy from start to finish, and I had massive, massive, massive levels of confusion at various points. The plan that Hope and the girls set up, the Paige/Eve connection, Tony ending up dead and naked with no real explanation — some of it stayed murky even after everything came out. I accepted the ending. I’m not sure I totally bought it.
Would I Relisten?
No. Once was enough for this one.
Who Is This For
If you like a women’s thriller with a lot of moving parts and characters who all have real things going on beyond the main plot, you’ll find things to like here. The personal storylines are the strongest parts of this book. The thriller mechanics are ambitious — maybe a little too ambitious. Go in knowing it gets chaotic and you’ll be fine. Go in expecting a clean plot and you might not be.
Where to Get This Book
📖 Physical Book
Amazon US | Amazon CA | Bookshop.org
🎧 Audiobook
Audible US | Audible CA | Libro.fm
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Plot Twisted. 🔥
🎧 | Genre: Thriller | Steam: 🔥