Girls' Night Out by Liz Fenton & Lisa Steinke ~ a Review

by Susan Roberts

Women need their friends to help them through the problems in their lives and to be there to celebrate the good times. Sometimes over time these friendships fracture and can't be put back together no matter how hard we try.
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July 2018; Lake Union Publishing
978-1503902565
audio, ebook, print (336 pages); thriller

Three is a difficult number of friends because there is always one left out.  In this novel, Ashley is the leader and the person that both Natalie and Lauren want to be their best friend.  All three have secrets - whether it's their marriage, spousal abuse or the death of a loved one, they are keeping their deepest secrets from their best friends.

Ashley, Natalie, and Lauren became friends in college. Now at nearly 40, their friendship is in bad shape. To try to recover their feelings towards each other, they plan a girls weekend in Mexico. The three of them go there with high hopes of resurrecting their friendship but they are all hiding secrets from each other that makes that very difficult. When one of them goes missing, its unsure whether she ran off on her own or whether the secrets that they have from each other caused someone to snap and do her harm. Trying to find her causes guilt and growing suspicion between the two survivors. It's a real page-turning story with an ending that I didn't see coming.

Liz and Lisa have once again written a thrilling book with very real characters in a nail-biting story. The setting in Mexico is beautiful and at odds with the turmoil going on between the three friends - or are they former friends?

Buy Girls' Night Out at Amazon

Note:  There was interesting information in the acknowledgments of this novel about the longtime friendship between the two authors and how writing Girl's Night Out tested that friendship.

"Our thirty-year friendship and nine-year writing relationship came to a roaring halt while writing our latest release, Girls’ Night Out, a novel that mirrored our own connection in ways that both scared and intrigued us. We were being tested. Did we have the impenetrable bond we thought we did?

As you can imagine, Girls’ Night Out is very special to us, and we’ve dedicated it to best friends everywhere. Not only because it’s the story of two long-time friends and business partners who fall apart. But because we fought to persevere. We battled to save our friendship. To fix Girls’ Night Out. Again, the two things inexplicably intertwined. So, we hold this one close to our hearts and hope those who read it will too. We hope it will be a reminder that nothing great is ever easy."

Susan Roberts lives in North Carolina when she isn't traveling. She and her husband enjoy traveling, gardening and spending time with their family and friends. She reads almost anything (and the piles of books in her house prove that) but her favorite genres are Southern fiction, women's fiction, and thrillers. Susan is a top 1% Goodreads Reviewer. You can connect with Susan on Facebook, Goodreads,  or Twitter.

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