The Reunion, Bronwyn Rivers

Ten years ago six teenagers hiked into the wilderness and five of them came back alive. They were school friends. Ed (whose family farm was their starting off point), Hugh, Charlotte, Laura, Jack and Alex, close, but with the sorts of slightly complicated romantic attachments and fractures that you find in groups of kids of that age. Nobody for a moment thought that this would be a dangerous hike, they were experienced walkers, fit, and Ed knew this area from a childhood growing up here. Only Ed died, and for the ten years since his mother Mary has had plenty of time to think about her beloved only child's death.

Maybe it was triggered by the anniversary, maybe it was too much time on her hands since the inquest into her son's death, then the suicide of her husband, Ed's father, but the house wasn't the same happy place that the five returned to, invited by Mary for an anniversary weekend. The once immaculate place is ramshackle and neglected, and there's something very odd about Mary. The problem is that none of remaining five friends could ever have imagined just how obsessed, how determined to get to the truth she is, until it's almost too late for all of them. 

Told in a series of differing POV chapters, the early part of the book will require some concentration on the part of the reader as you're taken back to each person's teenage years, as well as who they are as adults. There's reminiscence and past transgressions to be fleshed out, as well as present life changes including marriages, pregnancy, careers that have taken some in unexpected directions. Importantly, there are the connections between them then and now, events that shaped their interactions and relationships, and the cryptic questions laid out in notes that they start to find around the property, as they search for ways out of the intricate and very specific trap set for them.

Whilst it's a thriller in nature, there's also something surprisingly reflective about THE REUNION. Whether it's the contrasting experiences and pasts of the main characters, including Ed, and the sorts of secrets they have been keeping for a very long time, or their individual responses to pressure, these are adults forced into confronting their pasts and who they were and have become. Making the reader unsure at every step of where this is heading, setting up some really tricky characters as people that you may just end up with some respect for, leading to a resolution that did feel like it might be surprisingly gentle on a lot of very traumatised people. Until a final kick in the tail that readers less rattled may say they could see coming, but put this reader, by then, in the thoroughly rattled camp.

A debut novel, THE REUNION, started out as a bit of a sleeper, ended up as a haunter of nights.