My God, this is a psychological thriller if I’ve ever read one.
These are my favourite type of books; they’re chock full of suspense that’ll leave you clutching the book with sweaty hands on the edge of your seat. The premise of this book promised to deliver just that; still, it could not have at all prepared me for what was to come.
We Were Never Here by Andrea Bartz starts off in a near-utopia-like fashion. Two best friends, Emily and Kristen, living on opposite ends of the world reunite for a vacation in Chile. It’s the girls’ trip that finally made it out of the group chat! How could you not be happy for them?
Alas, it’s too good to be true. During their last night there, Kristen meets a backpacker and brings him back to their hotel room to have sex. Emily comes back later that night to find the backpacker dead, and Kristen holding a broken lampshade in her hands. Major déja vu moment—their last trip ended in similar circumstances. That time they got away with it scot-free, but this time… they might not be so lucky.
I will try my best not to spoil the whole book for you, but I just need to say one thing: at no point while reading this book could I have accurately predicted what was going to happen next. I know it seems like a cliché for a mystery/psychological thriller genre, but I feel like most other books of this kind that I have read have been way more predictable. Even if they don’t give away the whole story, the clues are still easier to decipher. There is absolutely nothing predictable about this book. While there are plenty of clues littered along the way neatly tucked away in the crevices of character development, symbols, and subplots, they don’t really hint at what’s to come.
I think that’s what made this book in particular so intriguing. I’ve tried reading a few psychological thriller/mystery books this past year, but I felt like I could never make it to the end of them. This one, though, was different. It almost feels like like you’re playing a game with yourself, like trying to guess what’s the worst thing that can possibly happen next in the story and then seeing how wrong you are.
The author is able to achieve this with her writing style. For one thing, she manages to pace the story in a way that just the right amount of suspense builds up at each page turn. It’s not too rushed, but it’s not too slow, either. While a lot of books of this genre are focused on the overall outcome or a whodunit? storyline, Andrea Bartz puts more emphasis on the character’s voice. She writes in a way that makes you feel like you are the main character. This is mainly attributed to the first-person narration, but it’s also because she describes the characters’ emotions with so much intricacy that their physical feelings manifest for you as well. If Emily was feeling her legs giving out, so was I. There were other parts of this story where I genuinely felt my heart racing as if I was the one the story was happening to. I’ll admit, it was hard for me to sleep some nights after reading this book.
Another way that Bartz manages to enhance the unpredictability of this book is how she stages each of the clues. Many of them are clearly laid out but they don’t catch our attention at first glance, because we are distracted by something else going on that is more urgent. For example, when Kristen goes back to their hotel room with the mysterious backpacker, I wasn’t even thinking of what could possibly be happening in the room because I was distracted by Emily losing her wallet. There are plenty of other examples of this littered throughout the story, but for the sake of limiting spoilers, I’ll let you discover them for yourself.
The only thing I disliked about this story was that it left me with a lot of questions that I felt could have easily been answered. This is not necessarily a bad thing; in some books, it even adds to the essence of the story. The way this book ended made it more interesting to contemplate potential scenarios for those unanswered questions. The only thing that really bugged me about this was that I felt like I didn’t have enough closure.
Overall, I would highly recommend this book even if psychological thrillers aren’t really your cup of tea.