Review: "The Yacht" by S.L. Goodwin

The Yacht by S.L. Goodwin
Published January 2024 via Avon
★★★

It's supposed to be a fun weekend with friends—a yacht, a New Year's Eve party, plenty of booze and laughter to go around. But for Hannah, who is by far the least financially successful of her friends, things go sour almost immediately when she realizes how little friendship the others are actually willing to offer...and then things get much, much worse when the moored yacht is set adrift. Without any fuel. And they're out to sea, with no communications and very little food and a storm on the way, and the bodies start to pile up...

I love me a good locked-room mystery, and you can't get much more locked room than a boat out to see with a trapped group of passengers. That said...my favorite mysteries are the ones where I'm scared for the characters: scared that they won't survive. I like being devastated when characters I've connected with turn up dead. (I'll take it up with my imaginary therapist, I promise.) That's a lot harder to do when all or almost all of the characters prove themselves to be utterly dreadful people, mostly right away—because in that case I just start rooting for them to die sooner rather than later, and that's not nearly as fun.

The book did keep me guessing; I had some ideas (some better than others) but didn't know how things would turn out until, well, they turned out. A couple of things stretch the bounds of the imagination (how the survivors survive, for example), but I do like not being able to predict how things went down, or will go down, until they're revealed. The book didn't give me the yikes I had hoped for (I was sad about literally none of the deaths), but it was a fun read for a miniature reading rut.