Thank you to Net galley for kindly sending me a free kindly copy of this book in exchange for a honest review. 

If half stars existed then I would give this one a 3.5.

I was excited and intrigued to read this one because I recently found out that this author also writes chic lit under the name of Eva Woods and I’ve read and thoroughly enjoyed one of her books. 

All in all this was a good read. It was well written, it flowed well and it kept my interest throughout. I was surprised by what happened towards the end however I did think that the ending was a bit random and rushed and that it was all a bit of a jumble and was thrown together. Overall I would definitely recommend this one.

This is a great thriller about what happens when 6 friends get together after 20 years
After a while, the friendships show cracks
This is a thriller that will keep you guessing
You will be mesmerized by this book

I enjoyed this one. It was saddening because I found myself nodding with a lot of it - unfortunately this is what life can be like for a woman, still in this day and age. It might need a trigger warning or something because I expect this book would be difficult for certain individuals to read. It felt somewhat a bit slow paced in parts, I found myself to be a bit like ‘get on with it’ but the reveals towards the end were shocking!!!

An excellent thriller, but since I didn't really care too much about the characters, I wasn't as involved in the story as I like to be.

It was meant to be a relaxed weekend and reunion of old friends, but then it turns into an absolute nightmare. It’s been 25 years that Ali and her husband Mike first met their friends Karen, Jodi, Bill and Callum at university, a reason to celebrate in their new home. Yet, after a lot of alcohol, a loud cry from Karen suddenly ends the joyful get together: Karen claims to have been assaulted by Mike, her bleeding and overall status seem confirm her accusation. After Mike’s arrest, Ali’s world slowly crumbles and falls, the more she learns about her husband, the more she has to ask herself if she really knew whom she has been married to for all those years. Not only did he have an affair all those years, but also are there money transfers to an unknown account and more pieces of information that are far beyond just being inconvenient: they are purely frightening. But this is just the beginning.

Claire McGowan’s thriller is absolutely breath taking. It is mainly narrated from Ali’s point of you and you constantly ask yourself: what would I do if I were in her shoes? Whom would I believe, my husband or my former best friend? Would I stick to my ideals or try to save the life I had worked for for years? How far would I be willing to go for the person I love? The story moves at a very high pace, just whenever you think the characters have found a way of coping with the catastrophe, the next follows immediately only to make the whole situation even worse. There is no moment to relax and sit down to think through the mess they are in, they are forced to react to ever more complications from one minute to the other.

The plot is very cleverly constructed, revealing its full potential only slowly. What makes it especially delicate is the fact that it plays on those core emotions in life: trust and believe in the people who are closest to you. It hurts a lot more to feel betrayed by the ones you love than coping with just with stressful situations. Additionally, I found it quite clever to put Ali in the position where she is presented as an advocate for women who have been assaulted and speak out against their perpetrators and then finding her in the position where she is inclined to take the other side and rather believe her husband than the woman – and friend! – who without any doubt is a victim.

I utterly rushed through the novel since I could hardly put it down. The short chapters even accelerated the plot and made you read on just one more chapter and another one and so on until the end. A brilliant story that I enjoyed throughout.

This really kept me guessing and desperate to find out the secrets contained within the story  -  I really enjoyed the book, excellent read and great start to my holiday!

On page 144 of What You Did, Ali, our main character, the point of view which we are forced to follow and care about, has an epiphany. “If I wanted to keep my home, for my children’s sake, I had to get Mike’s case dropped, and fast.” Here we have a woman who allegedly works at a women’s shelter, advocating specifically for rape survivors, gearing herself up to present her best friend as a promiscuous liar so that the rape charge she has laid against Ali’s husband will be dropped. Why? So that her children can continue going to private school. I must reiterate: this is our protagonist. Keep that in mind as we begin the review.

 
Six old friends, close since their Oxford days, reunite for a party. Ali and husband Mike live a charmed middle class life just outside London with their two children. Second married couple Jodi and Callum are wealthy lawyers on the brink of having their first long awaited baby. The two singletons are Karen, Ali’s flighty best friend, and the reserved Bill, recently separated from his wife. Late into the night, Ali is roused from sleep. When she gets downstairs, Karen bursts through the back door wild with terror. Blood is running down her legs. She cries out that she has been raped – by Mike.

 
When I reached page 35, I made a note that predicted the major twist of this novel, including the identity of the rapist and how he had performed his operation. I know it was page 35, because I wrote “let it be known that if I’m right I predicted this on page 35.” And now I’m letting it be known, because as it happens I was right. This book has 284 pages, and its plot is pedestrian enough to be completely guessed within the first 35. Consequently, it immediately fails as a thriller. I can hardly write that the novel contains “twists and turns,” as the cliché goes, because each narrative beat ambles by with exhausting banality, never shocking, never impressive, never in any danger of outsmarting an observant reader.

 
A novel with a bland plot can often be redeemed by charming characters, or expert prose. Sadly, What You Did can boast neither. McGowan’s style is mostly nondescript, with only the occasional sprinkling of awful to catch your attention. One particularly shoddy excerpt made me laugh aloud:

 
 “She didn’t blink. They probably trained them at teacher school.”

 
I checked the acknowledgements, and this book had at least three editors. Three people looked over this, saw “they probably trained them at teacher school,” and thought to themselves, “yeah, that’s fine. That sounds like a feasible thing for an Oxford graduate and semi-celebrated journalist in her mid-forties to say.” Teacher school. I am agog, I am aghast. It’s like something an eleven year old would write.

 
The characters, unlike the prose, do not have a mere sprinkling of awful. Awful has been dumped into them in the same manner as I dump cumin into most of the meals I make. Top unscrewed, right from the jar in a big lump. However, while a good lump of cumin can elevate lasagne, the same amount of awful scarcely does the same for your cast. It takes a master to put utterly terrible people to paper and make it work. Think Nabokov’s Humbert Humbert, Richardson’s Robert Lovelace, or Sade’s entire repertoire. Ali has none of the nuance or the self-consciousness of the aforementioned. She is possibly one of the worst protagonists I have ever had to suffer, and that is not a hammer which I can swing lightly. She is yet another example of an increasingly prevalent trope I am finding in contemporary fiction – that of the frumpy, motherly, self-righteous lead who holds a thinly veiled resentment for younger, prettier, more successful women. For someone whose feminist activism is blasted at the reader from the outset, Ali is an awful feminist. She continually slutshames and demeans women who lead lifestyles which are different to her own, from “yummy mummies” (page 93) to rape and murder victims whose ordeals “did not have to ruin anyone else’s life […] not when you were so pretty you were like a walking wound.” (page 101). These views are utterly inconsistent with someone who is a professional advocate for rape victims, and the fact that her husband is the accused is not a suitable explanation. Nor, indeed, does one sentence saying she’s “upset at what she has become” towards the end of the novel absolve her, especially when she faces no consequences whatsoever for her behaviour. If I was presented that justification in a university creative writing class, I would dry out a red marker by circling “show, don’t tell!” over and over again.

 
The worst part about Ali’s character is that nothing happens to her to make her realise that her actions have consequences. The confession of the rapist, relayed only to Ali, is taken as gospel despite the fact that she has been caught deliberately attempting to malign Karen’s character in order to have the charges dropped against Mike, and she ends the novel riding off into the sunset with a dream man and a better relationship with both her children and her estranged mother. This is not a satisfying end for a really quite detestable antihero who gets depressingly close to letting a rapist go free because she’s too self-obsessed and bitter. She does not deserve the ending which she is gifted. While I understand that McGowan is deliberately presenting Ali’s actions in such a way that is not meant to be likeable, it’s done with such little thought that it simply doesn’t work. Spending one sentence on Ali having a brief moment of self reflection does not make a novel’s worth of maliciousness disappear.

 
A shocking premise, one which required far more nuance than what is presented here.

What a brilliant book.  Centering on family, friends, secrets and how lies have a way of catching you up. 

I loved this thriller especially the ending.

It was a little confusing trying to keep all the characters straight and many were very unlikeable but this was a decent book for a day on the beach.

What you did by Claire McGowan
Reunions are supposed to be exciting, reunions are supposed to be memorable but this reunion proves to be a nightmare for the protagonist. Ali decides a reunion with her friends from university after twenty years. Ali, a home maker and a volunteer at a local shelter for victims for rape and domestic abuse and Mike, a corporate lawyer are married with two children and a lovely suburban home. Jodi and Callum are lawyers and Jodi is heavily pregnant with the child she's longed for. Karen is raising a son by herself and lives in near poverty. Bill has returned home from Sweden after ending a relationship. 
Amidst all the partying and drinking, Ali's best friend Karen stumbles inside from the garden accusing Mike of sexually assaulting her. Mike denies the accusation but Karen does not relent. Ali does not know who to believe – Is her husband capable of committing such a heinous crime? Is her best friend capable of telling such an improbable lie?
Ali is pulled in both directions, wanting to believe both her husband and her best friend. She is at crossroads with herself especially when she is the one dealing with such cases daily at her workplace.
Secrets start to unravel and the reader is forced to think what kind of a friendship did the six share as everybody is hiding something or the other from everybody else. The rape accusation also reveals a murder of a common friend Martha while they were still in college. The plot becomes more and more complex as the story progresses.  
The story is of course fictional but sometime as readers we tend to search for some sort of connect with reality even in a novel. We are unable to associate or empathize with the characters as they are all too self obsessed. The quality of writing is superior but the plot fails to impress, with more complexities woven in the plot than what is necessary
My score 3 * / 5

This was good. The reason for 4 stars is that I did not really like any of the characters and each one seemed to serve the standard, predictable role for this type of storyline. Having said that, it still held my interest and the ending was a nice surprise. It begins with a group of reunited college friends, an assault and then flashbacks and flash forwards until the truth is revealed. Most chapters give at least a hint of of a clue as to what actually happened and that makes you want to keep reading. Overall, a good read, Just difficult to connect with anyone.

Memories are deceiving or are they?
A vicious assault and rape occurred with Karen accusing Mike Ali's husband but Ali isn't sure who to trust or believe?
Mike swears he's innocent but Karen is adament he's the one....
What if her memory serves her wrong?
Sexual assault and rape are often crimes of passion but what if there's more to this story....
I can't go into specifics but safe to say someone knows the truth and it is quite twisty in getting to that person...
Hold on tight!

I had to DNF this book. I just could not get into it. I didn’t connect with any characters and the story just wasn’t there for me. 

Huge thank you to Netgalley and Thomas and Mercer for this opportunity!!!

This is a fabulous thriller and one of the best books I’ve read in a while. There are plenty of twists and turns that will keep you guessing right up to the last page. The characters develop well throughout the book and the relationship between them all is intriguing. 
I’d definitely recommend this book and it’s worthy of a big fat 5 stars.

Excellent psychological thriller!  It moved at a fast pace with twists and turns throughout!  Well-developed characters and plot. I loved the angle of husband vs best friend and the struggle for Ali to trust one of them over the other.  Highly recommend!

I’ve received this book from Netgalley in exchange for my honest opinion:
This book is a psychological thriller with some quite dark & violent context. Very gripping and the said context flows extremely well. I found myself anticipating getting home to pick up where I have left off. 
 There were parts where I had to literally hold back the tears, it was a challenge at times. 

All in all great book.

I really had to think before writing this review because, although this was a really good story, I actively disliked most of the characters. Most of the book is told from the point of view of Ali and at the beginning I had a lot of sympathy for her. As the book progressed my opinion changed until towards the end I loathed her. She was so ashamed of her working class background and claimed to be embarrassed by her parents when they came to visit her at Oxford. She was the worst sort of snob elitist, self obsessed and entitled. Having said that it is thanks to the quality of the writing that I was able to have such strong feelings about her.. 
The author was able to set the scene so well that I really could see the back garden in the aftermath of the party. I thought the flashbacks were really evocative too. I have never been to Oxford but could envisage it as if I had been there at the time the characters were students. Finally, I had absolutely no inkling of how the book would end and was really surprised at how things turned out. All in all this was a really well written, enjoyable book that I wouldn't hesitate to recommend.

Review posted on Goodreads and Amazon

What an awful book. I really didn’t like this at all 
The writing style was poor and the characters were horrible

What You Did was the story of a group of college friends reconnecting as adults. It follows the wife of a man who is accused of sexual assault after one of the women is attacked in the garden during their get together.

I found the story to start off strong but went downhill the further into it that I read. All of the characters were incredibly unlikeable in their own ways and though I accepted them as is it still didn't stop me from wanting to pull them from the pages to yell at them.

The jumping between perspectives and from present day to the other events that took place in 1996 felt quite unnecessary to the overall story. In the end it was a quite run of the mill predictable thriller.

A very good book with many twists and turns.  I enjoyed the up to date story mixed in with something that happened 20 years ago when the characters first met at university.  A very unexpected ending indeed. Kept me interested and would recommend.