MADE YOU LOOK

In this debut thriller, a Catskills getaway goes fatally wrong.

A trio of social media influencers, their talent manager, a photographer, and a “style tastemaker” are off on a four-day photo-op and “in-person strategy session” at a Catskills retreat; one of the influencers calls the destination “a super-exclusive vacation rental where you get all the amenities of a hotel but with the privacy of being in your own space.” The amenities are swell, but what the group doesn’t bargain for is a snowstorm severe enough to strand them and, worse, knock out the Wi-Fi, and they couldn’t have foreseen that there would be no emergency landline. Also not anticipated are the weird things that start happening soon after the group arrives: One of the influencers can’t find the drone he swears he packed, a gunshot rings out while everyone is headed to a photo shoot by a waterfall, and so on. It isn’t until practically the book’s halfway mark that one of the characters dies (it’s not from natural causes); by this point, readers may have been finding themselves not wishing anyone dead but hoping that at least one of the looks-obsessed, self-absorbed influencers would fall into a snowdrift. Fortunately, the photographer, who is best friends with one influencer and splits narrative duties with another, is a reliably levelheaded audience surrogate (“What’s the point of beauty if everything else is falling apart?”). Grant is a spry writer, and her book’s gangbusters last hundred-odd pages justify the seemingly discursive but, it turns out, carefully calibrated scenes leading up to the denouement. Given how things shake down, readers who chide people who live their lives on social media may end up thinking twice.

An avalanche of suspense once things get rolling.