Everyone Who Can Forgive Me Is Dead by Jenny Hollander #bookreview #thriller #suspense

**This post contains Amazon affiliate links which will allow me as an associate to earn a small commission on any purchase made through the link of the products I share. This commission in no way changes the pricing of any items for the buyer.**

Title: Everyone Who Can Forgive Me Is Dead

Author:  Jenny Hollander

Publisher: Minotaur Books

Publication Date: February 6, 2024

Page Count:  294

My rating: 2 1/2 stars

About the book:

She has everything to live for―and everything to hide.

Nine years ago, with the world’s eyes on her, Charlie Colbert fled. The press and the police called Charlie a “witness” to the nightmarish events at her elite graduate school on Christmas Eve―events known to the public as “Scarlet Christmas”―though Charlie knows she was much more than that.

Now, Charlie has meticulously rebuilt her life: She’s the editor-in-chief of a major magazine, engaged to the golden child of the publishing industry, and hell-bent on never, ever letting her guard down again. But when a buzzy film made by one of Charlie’s former classmates threatens to shatter everything she’s worked for, Charlie realizes how much she’s changed in nine years. Now, she’s not going to let anything―not even the people she once loved most―get in her way.

Everyone Who Can Forgive Me Is Dead by Jenny Hollander is a debut psychological suspense novel. The story in Everyone Who Can Forgive Me Is Dead is one that is told in a dual timeline style switching between the past and present with more emphasis on the present timeline.

Nine years ago headlines everywhere lit up with the story of a mass murder on a school campus which reporters and police dubbed it the “Scarlet Christmas”. Charlie Colbert was there as events took place and became the witness everyone wanted to hear from, the problem, Charlie doesn’t actually remember what happened.

Now, after years of therapy and being out of the spotlight Charlie has made a life for herself putting that long ago event out of her mind, or at least to the back of it. Charlie is now the editor of a major magazine and engaged to be married so the last thing Charlie needs is the past brought back to the surface so when she gets word of a possible movie being made Charlie’s goal is to do whatever it takes to stop it.

Everyone Who Can Forgive Me Is Dead is one of those books that I think I may be an outlier on with it just not quite working well for me. Everything about this one should have been something I loved but I ended it at two and a half stars with a bit of disappointment. For me this one was incredibly slow which often makes it harder to stay engaged but with that said I wondered if the author had focused more in the past and built the event up better if it would have made the pacing pick up too. Whatever the case I would probably give this author another shot if she wrote another thriller though.

I received an advance copy from the publisher via NetGalley.

Find this book online:

Goodreads  /  Amazon

About the author:

Hi! I’m Jenny, a writer and editor from London. My debut novel, EVERYONE WHO CAN FORGIVE ME IS DEAD, was published by St. Martin’s Press (US) and Little, Brown (UK) on February 6, 2024.

My work has been featured in ELLE, Cosmopolitan, Marie Claire, Bustle, Harper’s Bazaar, and more. I spent ten years in New York, where I worked as a senior editor for Bustle and the deputy editor at Marie Claire. Now the digital director for Marie Claire, I live in London with my husband and our rescue dog, Captain. When I’m not knee-deep in Google Analytics, an edit, or a manuscript, I’m a fierce advocate for developmental coordination disorder, known in the U.K. as dyspraxia, which I was diagnosed with when I was nine.