Lux has spent several years waiting. She was waiting tables, and that’s how she met Nico. He had a great smile, and Lux fell for him almost immediately. She was living in San Diego, but there was nothing tying her there since her mother died. So when Nico invited her to join him on his sailboat, she said yes. But when they got to Hawaii, the boat got injured, and Nico didn’t want to ask his parents for money. So Lux got a job cleaning rooms at a resort and Nico got a job fixing boats at the marina. And they waited.

And then Nico met Amma and Brittany. They wanted someone to take them to a small island (an atoll, actually) called Meroe Island. They offered Nico $50,000 for a 2-week trip to Meroe. At first Lux was concerned about the idea of his spending 2 weeks on the boat with these women he just met, but when she met them, she liked them a lot, and they liked her, and they said she should come along too. When Lux realized that they could get the friends to pay for the repairs on Nico’s boat, she agreed to come. Then when the trip was over, she and Nico could take the sailboat out on their own and go anywhere. No more waiting. They make their preparations, and set sail for Meroe.

Once they get to the island, they find out that they are not alone. There is another boat, a larger boat, already there. Jake and his girlfriend Eliza invite them all to a big dinner around a campfire. There are lots of fish, and there is plenty of wine, so they all become fast friends. Days slip by on Meroe, swimming and summing, eating and drinking, lots of drinking. But the island has a way of getting to you, Lux finds. The more she learns about it, the creepier it seems. It had been used as an airfield during World War II. There are jungles with dense vegetation and predators. The brightly colored fish that swim around the island are toxic, and there are sharks in the waters as well.

As time goes on, Lux sees some cracks in the life she’d been waiting for. There are moments that she’s reminded she doesn’t Nico very well, and she barely knows Brittany and Amma at all. But what else can she do? She’s stuck there on the island with them for the full two weeks, and beyond that, she doesn’t really have anything else. She lost her mother and doesn’t get along with her father. She has no job. She left college to care for her mother when she got sick. She lost touch with all her old friends. All she has now is Nico and his boat and his dreams of sailing to amazing places. She has new friends Amma and Brittany. And new friends Jake and Eliza. And her own wits and will to survive.

And then, when another boat shows up, and Robbie shows up on their beach, Lux has a bad feeling. She has a bad feeling about him, she has a bad feeling about Meroe, and she’s starting to question everyone else on the island. It seems like everyone has secrets, everyone has an agenda, and Lux will have to work to figure out who she can trust to get away from Meroe Island and on to her future.

Reckless Girls is a creepy boat thriller that makes for one amazing trip. Author Rachel Hawkins brought us last year’s The Wife Upstairs, a contemporary Jane Eyre that made almost everyone’s best lists for the year, and she’s back with another insightful look at money and class disguised as an unputdownable novel.

I got sucked in to Reckless Girls almost from the first chapter. As the tension went up a notch, I got pulled in deeper, over and over, until I had to race to the end of the book. I thought the characters were strong individuals, and the setting of Meroe Island lent the perfect threat to the vacationers. And as you get to the end and see how it all comes together, there is a true beauty to the underlying theme. This is a novel that will stick with me for a long time, in part because of the fantastic story and in part because of that thoughtful theme. Rachel Hawkins just keeps getting better!

Egalleys for The Reckless Girls were provided by St. Martin’s Press through NetGalley, with many thanks.