When Andy and her friends were teenagers, they ran around feeling free and playing games. Even into high school, she and Peter and Em and Marcus would create games for themselves, playfully dancing around or solving mysteries or telling stories.
Near their small town was a rundown manor. Once, it has been the home of posh socialites. Now it’s in disrepair and overgrown. As their time in school drew closer and closer to its end, Andy and her friends spent more time there. Before Peter was going off to Oxford, before Em went to art school. before Marcus and Andy went to work for Marcus’s uncle Darren full-time, they spent time together at the manor. That is where they met David.
David was a friend of the new owners of the manor. He was just a year or two older and, having run out on a school trip to Italy (where he may have liberated a teacher’s credit card and cash), now he’s squatting at the manor. The friends draw David into their favorite game, a game of hide and seek.
Back when the manor belonged to the rich couple, there was a snowy weekend where they invited friends for a couple of days of drinking and spending time together. But one weekend night, the lady of the house discovered that her diamond necklace was missing. The thief was discovered by the pond out back, his tracks in the snow showing he walked to the front gate (speculation was that he was to meet a conspirator, who would pick him up, but the snow made the road undriveable), and then to the back. He was found frozen on a bench, with his heart medicine in his hands. The necklace was never found, not on his body nor anywhere else his tracks had shown.
Em had found a replica of the necklace at the charity shop in town (the story had been big news across the area, and replica necklaces were made by the hundreds), and the teens would hide it and seek it out over and over. Meanwhile, both Peter and Andy found themselves attracted to David, but Andy was the one who won his heart. It was the last summer the friends had together, the only summer Andy had with David, and it changed all of them.
Now it’s many years later. Andy is grown and working in London when she gets the call from Peter’s mother. Peter didn’t call when he usually did that weekend, or the weekend before. Andy said she’d try to get ahold of him, and that’s when she finds out that no one has seen him for weeks.
Andy’s search for her childhood friend takes her back to her childhood, both to the manor and to the places she went to the manor to escape. Her journey is a reckoning of sorts, as she looks for her friend by exorcising all their former demons. But will Andy’s search for Peter put her and those around her in a danger that she can’t escape from?
Before the Ruins is a thriller about a search for a missing man, but it is also an atmospheric exploration of the choices we make as teenagers that stick with us for the rest of our lives. Author Victoria Gosling has crafted a story that is part coming of age, part coming to terms, that will infect your thoughts and your dreams and your conversations for weeks to come.
The book isn’t all that long for a thriller (less than 300 pages), but it feels like it’s twice as long. The emotional depth these characters go to and the powerful memories they uncover are weighty with a pathos that transcends story and characters. As I read it, I found myself thinking about Tana French’s In the Woods, and I honestly can’t think of a higher compliment than that. Gosling is masterful as a story teller, and she left me wrecked for days after finishing Before the Ruins. I can’t wrap my head the fact that this is her first novel. I can’t even begin to imagine where she will take us next.
Egalleys for Before the Ruins were provided by Henry Holt & Company through NetGalley, with many thanks.
