Thriller fans listen up: if you haven’t had Summer’s Edge on your radar before, now is the time to rectify that. Looking for the kind of thriller that thrills you? Gets your heart pumping and your blood racing? Well, you’ll want to have your eye on this one. Don’t believe me? Let me explain why…
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I Know What You Did Last Summer meets The Haunting of Hill House  in this atmospheric, eerie teen thriller following an estranged group of friends being haunted by their friend who died last summer.
Emily Joiner was once part of an inseparable group—she was a sister, a best friend, a lover, and a rival. Summers without Emily were unthinkable. Until the fire burned the lake house to ashes with her inside.
A year later, it’s in Emily’s honor that Chelsea and her four friends decide to return. The house awaits them, meticulously rebuilt. Only, Chelsea is haunted by ghostly visions. Loner Ryan stirs up old hurts and forces golden boy Chase to play peacemaker. Which has perfect hostess Kennedy on edge as eerie events culminate in a stunning accusation: Emily’s death wasn’t an accident. And all the clues needed to find the person responsible are right here.
As old betrayals rise to the surface, Chelsea and her friends have one night to unravel a mystery spanning three summers before a killer among them exacts their revenge.
Summer’s Edge
Dana Mele
Rep: lesbian mc, bi mc
Release: 31st May 2022
The sign of a good thriller is whether it can make you say/whisper/mouth the words ‘what the fuck’ when the twist(s) come. By that metric, Summer’s Edge is a very good one.
This is a book where it’s best you go into it not knowing anything much about the plot besides what the blurb tells you. It’s a book about a group of friends returning to the scene where, a couple of years back, their other friend died. I’m not going to tell you a single word more than that because I don’t want to spoil anything (which could make writing this review a bit difficult, but we’ll see).
What I loved about People Like Us, and what I also loved here, was just how well Dana Mele builds the tension of what’s going on. Over and over again, you’re left with more and more questions piling up on one another and the book pulls you forward and sucks you in inexorably. You couldn’t put this one down if you even tried, that’s how good it is. You want to know what’s going on because—though this could just be me—you have no idea where it’s going to go next.
Part of what makes the book so compelling is the characters. I would hesitate to say that these are morally grey characters, but they’re on that spectrum. This is going to be a hard one to really explain without spoilers (and I’ve typed out the start of this sentence at least three times in an attempt to minimise them), but none of them are really likeable either. In that kind of way where you still do like them enough to follow the story about them. Think in the way that you, perhaps against your better judgement, liked the characters in The Secret History. You didn’t like them so much as you were compelled by them. A car crash you can’t look away from.
And then there come the twists. As I said at the start, the mark of a good thriller is whether it makes you swear out loud (or in your head, I suppose), and this one does just that. (I mean, the entirety of my initial review was just ohwhatthefuck.) I don’t recall just how much I actually predicted what was happening (very little, I think), but I do recall the feeling of absolute mindblown-ness that this book gave me. I finished it and I had to sit for a while to just let it all sink in. This was a genuinely thrilling thriller, and that’s all I could really ask for.
So I just hope that this review has managed to convince you to pick this one up. And I also hope that it’s been spoiler free and vague enough that you can go in with no idea of what’s going on and have your mind blown too.
So, have we convinced you that you want to read this book?
