The Long Weekend - Gilly Macmillan

Reading Challenge Category: Free ARC from NetGalley

Official Blurb:

By the time you read this, I'll have killed one of your husbands.
In an isolated retreat, deep in the Northumbria moors, three women arrive for a weekend getaway. Their husbands will be joining them in the morning. Or so they think.
But when they get to Dark Fell Barn, the women find a devastating note that claims one of their husbands has been murdered. Their phones are out of range. There's no internet. They're stranded. And a storm's coming in.
Friendships fracture and the situation spins out of control as each wife tries to find out what's going on, who is responsible and which husband has been targeted.
This was a tight-knit group. They've survived a lot. But they won't weather this. Because someone has decided that enough is enough.
That it's time for a reckoning.

My Thoughts:

This book had a good premise, but it was rather slowly delivered.
There are only three chapters in the book FRIDAY, SATURDAY and SUNDAY. This both made me read faster and made the book drag at the same time.
I didn’t know going in that I wouldn’t reach the end of the first chapter for a very long time, so I kept reading, thinking I’d hit it soon. This meant my reading pace was quite fast; on the other hand, the story itself was very slow-moving.
The women all have some kind of personal mental problems, which hindered the story, in my opinion, as it meant none of them was capable of making rational decisions. They just kept going round and round in circles. Jayne kept going the wrong way every time she left the barn, getting soaked and then starting again after drying off. Emily just kept expecting her phone to work and waited until dark to wander off on her own. Rachel is just drunk. It made for a very frustrating read. Even Imogen made no rational decisions. She was seventeen but acted so much younger than that. She could have gotten away on multiple occasions but just kept messing up her escape attempts.
Once they have left the barn, the story picks up a little as we get one of the major reveals, but we still have a bit of tension of which husband could turn up dead. The ending was certainly better than the rest of the book and was worth the wait. Although it was overly complicated, you had to concentrate on following everything that was happening.
The worst thing about the book for me (and I really hope this is sorted for the final proof?) was the different points of view coming at you from sentence to sentence. Half the time, you didn’t know who the narrator was as there was no clear indication that you had left one character’s mind and entered another. I’d find myself having to reread many sections just to get to grips with whose POV it was. Even sections marked with a * to indicate a separation would have been helpful, although there would have been a lot of them as sometimes the POV was handed over for just a sentence.
So, overall not the best read. Only three stars from me.