This was just brilliant.
When Milla is invited to a get-together for old friends, little does she know that not it's not going to be a reunion to enjoy!
The perfect mix of thriller, suspense, and with a little relationship thrown in for good mix.
The idea of being stranded in an isolated ski resort building, with someone who is baying for blood was fab. A whodunnit that kept me guessing almost to the end. Well written, emotional, characters who I loved and loathed in equal measure. Brilliant.
Thanks to Netgalley and Allie Reynolds for the chance to read and review this great book.

Shiver is a fun, quick read about a group of friends who reunite at an isolated resort in the French Alps. There are a few surprises along the way, and a plotline that would appeal to fans of Lucy Foley and Ruth Ware’s latest, One by One.

One word, Wow!

This book may have just hit number one in my favourites.

When Milla is invited to a reunion in the French Alps resort that saw the peak of her snowboarding career, she drops everything to go. While she would rather forget the events of that winter, the invitation comes from Curtis, the one person she can’t seem to let go. The five friends haven’t seen eachother for a decade, since the disappearance of the beautiful and enigmatic Saskia. But when an icebreaker game turns menacing, they realise they don’t know who has really gathered them there and how far they will go to find the truth. In a deserted lodge high up on a mountain, the secrets of the past are about to come to light.

Started yesterday evening and just finished now, I was hooked from the first page. I loved absolutely everything about it, the characters and their strange relationships with eachother, the plot... the whole book is just brilliant.

Completely unique to anything I’ve read so far, it terrified me, upset me, but filled my heart with love too. My feelings towards the characters was such a rollercoaster throughout the book.

For a debut novel I have to say Allie Reynolds has absolutely smashed it out of the park and I cannot wait to read more from her.

Thank you to the publishers for allowing me to read this before release. This book will stay with me for a long long time.

If you haven’t read it, countdown to January because you aren’t going to want to miss this one.

OOOOOO I read this entire book in a day, I just couldnt stop.

It reminds me of a book version of Until Dawn the game which is a very very fun combination. A typical group of friends, a 10 year reunion, a secluded location and no phones.

I loved the duel timeline and loved that we have basically a handful a characters, one building and yet its such a tense and twisty book. Its so well written and kept me guessing until the very end. I definitely gasped out loud a few times.

Its everything that I want in a mystery/thriller and I cant believe this is the debut novel from this author. Sooo gooooooddddd.

Thank you to the author, publisher and NetGalley for providing an ARC of this book.

Great story with a great ending! Like the way the story was told by alternating the present day with the background.

What a great read! Top notch thriller and horror to be honest set in the world of competitive snowboarding. I know nothing about sport or this sport at all, but I was HOOKED! God this is dog eat dog isn't it?

Five snowboarders and friends are reunited on a mountain but no one knows why they are there or who invited them. The story is all about this reunion which builds the tension from the start. Then we go back in time to when the group of snowboarders was six....what happened to the other one? That's the key. The gift that keeps on giving. The mystery of this winds through the novel and Saskia, the girl who doesn't appear in the present day storyline - well I was looking at her through suspicious eyes. I went from one character to the other trying to work out the answer to the mystery but Alli keeps you guessing to the end, burying those secrets deep in the snow outside.

It's a chilling mystery, very entertaining and dark and claustrophobic too on that mountain. I've never read a novel set in this world before and I loved it. Recommended!

I LOVED this. So tense, kept me reading so late into the night I actually read it in one sitting. I'd recommend for fans of Ruth Ware and it certainly as a lot in common with 'one by one' in terms of story and location. A modern day Agatha Christie type story that flips between the past and the present and really keeps you guessing right up to the big reveal.

I absolutely loved this! I have read a couple of other thrillers set in ski chalets this year and really enjoyed them both so I was looking forward to this one. This was a bit different to the others in that the characters were professional snowboarders rather than holiday-makers.

Locked room mysteries are my very favourite genre and this one was done so well. All the characters were really well fleshed out and we got a lot of backstory without allowing the pace to drag. I loved the 'ten years ago' sections, I was really drawn into the group and I absolutely detested Saskia which is good as I love when a book makes me have strong feelings towards the characters.

A lot of the snowboarding references went above my head but it was fascinating to learn a little bit about a sport that I had absolutely no clue about until now.

With regards to the mystery itself, there are so many layers to it that I would be surprised if anyone managed to work it all out. I did guess parts of it but there were others that came as a surprise to me.

I really enjoyed this and find it hard to believe that it's a debut. Would fully recommend.

10 years ago Saskia, competitive snowboarder goes missing. 10 years later her friends meet up at the deserted ski resort having received a mysterious invitation but soon realise they are in danger. Is Saskia back for revenge?

The snowboarding world is a great setting with the need to win and compete high on the agenda. There are secrets to unravel and the main character Milla seeks to do exactly that whilst protecting her own secret concerning Saskia. A good debut thriller very evocative of Agatha Christie setting-wise although I would have liked the pace a bit faster mid way through.

There are chills galore in Shiver, the smart and uber twisty debut from Allie Reynolds which is set to be a lead title for Headline in 2021. Epitomising the publishing world’s hunger for the familiar but different, the novel capitalises on recent successes such as Ruth Ware’s In a Dark Dark Wood, and Lucy Foley’s The Hunting Party in its use of the locked-room thriller sub-genre. What differentiates this particular story, however, is its backdrop of competitive snowboarding which Reynolds (a former elite athlete in the field) mines to brilliant effect in order to ratchet up the stakes and tension.

The premise is a familiar one: five former friends and ex-sporting rivals meet for a reunion in the French Alps, 10 years after the disappearance (and now presumed death) of another of their number during the British Snowboarding Championships, an event which also left the seventh member of their group a quadriplegic. The reunion appears to have been orchestrated by Milla, the novel’s protagonist (who, in turn, believes her invitation came from Curtis, the dead girl’s brother) but it’s not long before they realise that the event is a set up, designed to revisit more than the good times they shared. As the tension ramps up amongst the group, and accusations fly, it’s clear that they’re not all going to get out of this alive.

Setting as character is an essential, but frequently underworked element of the locked-room trope so it is delightful to see it mined to such great effect in this novel. The spooky, unforgiving atmosphere of a ski resort in the off-season is replete with threats that appeal to us on a primal level, all of which Reynolds exploits with an almost joyful glee. Darkness, avalanches, power cuts, sub-zero temperatures, and a group of characters for whom time and distance has created its own social fractures all make their appearance with perfectly timed chills. There is history amongst this group; some of it known and some of it buried in secrets that the perpetrators would rather remain hidden, but as the stakes grow higher and the outside threat more menacing, the choice becomes one of which secrets could save their lives and which could hasten their end.

Controlling both of the dual timelines, Milla is a great choice of protagonist; her growing unreliability as a narrator a further twist in the Gordian knot of events. She is also the most developed of the characters in a novel which places its emphasis more on delivering the shocks than lengthy reflections on backstory or emotion. Whilst this certainly maintains the heart-stopping pace of the book it does feel at times as though this dampens emotional investment in the fate of its players. Though it’s a trade-off which doesn’t feel entirely necessary, neither does it ultimately harm the book, which readers will tear through to its bitter end. Indeed, my disappointment in this regard was alerted only by the tantalising glimpses Reynolds occasionally gives us into the deeper meaning of her story: the exquisite self-torture of secrets which, were they verbalised, might produce a different story than the ones we tell ourselves; the guilt and the blame that surrounds grief; the reflectiveness on choices that time allows us. To have mined these more would have been a fantastic addition, but ultimately perhaps have made for a different novel, and one less satisfying to the expectations of thriller readers.

As it is, the leanness of its prose, and its terrific attention to detail is impressive. Reynolds never directs the reader’s eye without purpose and there is much smugness to be gained in allowing us to seek these out moments and to see them paid off in due course. Chekov would be proud. Nor are the assiduous and frequent references to snowboarding parlance and technique wasted, but rather add to the milieu of suspense in the contrast between timelines; the twinning of silence with noise; of celebration with dread; of thrill with abject danger. Ten years ago these characters were universally fixated on winning a competition. In the present it is the same, only with much higher stakes, when the sometimes claustrophobic history of interpersonal relationships comes fully to bear in terms of who to trust in such a potentially dangerous situation. To this end, the set pieces of the novel are wonderfully vivid and alive, with nerve-jangling anticipation (special mention to the heart-stopping avalanche exercise which in its delivery and denouement was both terrifying and unexpected).

It is of absolutely no surprise that the novel has now been optioned for screen where I am sure it will find its perfect second expression. Visual, exciting and with a thrilling pace, this is a fantastic first outing for Allie Reynolds which heralds the start of an incredible career. As always, my thanks to NetGalley and to the publishers, Headline, for an ARC of the book in exchange for an honest review.

This is the third book I have read recently set in the alps with characters trapped in a chalet due to heavy snowfall. The first one was very good, the second one I read was really and truly excellent. Unfortunately this third one was quite lacking. Once again the book starts with a dysfunctional female in her thirties who has ended up with less than a happy life through bad decisions and a lack of drive to improve things. This characterisation exists in so many books these days as does the structure of Shiver. So many books give us either BEFORE/AFTER, THEN/NOW, JANUARY/AUGUST, FEBRUARY 9th/ December 19th etc, it does start to get a little tiring that the majority of new books follow these themes. When I realised that we were only going to be privy to five people I thought that they'd need to be fascinating characters with lots of secrets to be told. Unfortunately after reading quite a way in I decided that I wasn't bothered who had killed Saskia or what happened to the others. If you are a snowboarding fan then this book will be perfect for you, if not some of the techniques of this sport might leave you lost. Sorry, this book just wasn't for me especially having ready two similar ones recently.

Shiver is Allie Reynold's debut thriller set in the cut-throat world of competive snowballing, based on her experiences and knowledge of the sport, this novel is a "chilling" whodunnit and why.

Five friends who haven't seen each other for ten years are reunited at a deserted ski resort. Nobody knows who has arranged this "reunion" and everybody has secrets to hide and a very guilty past.

The story is cleverly told through alternating chapters taking the reader back to the past ten years ago when Saska, Curtis, Milla, Dale, Heather and Brent were young, eager, up and coming snowboarders starting their professional careers, taking risks and believing they were invincible... until six friends become five and their lives are turned upside down.

Now the five friends are forced to face each other again, suspicious of each other and harbouring their own guilty secrets, Shiver is a fast paced cat and mouse game set in the freezing mountains in a claustrophobic and atmospheric background.

All five characters are well developed and believable and I was constantly changing my mind on who was guilty and who was innocent. Enjoyable and recommended for all thriller fans out there.