What Lies in the Woods

They were eleven when they sent a killer to prison. They were heroes . . . but they were liars.

Kate Alice Marshall’s What Lies in the Woods is a thrilling novel about friendship, secrets, betrayal, and lies—and having the courage to face the past.

Naomi Shaw used to believe in magic. Twenty-two years ago, she and her two best friends, Cassidy and Olivia, spent the summer roaming the woods, imagining a world of ceremony and wonder. They called it the Goddess Game. The summer ended suddenly when Naomi was attacked. Miraculously, she survived her seventeen stab wounds and lived to identify the man who had hurt her. The girls’ testimony put away a serial killer, wanted for murdering six women. They were heroes.

And they were liars.

For decades, the friends have kept a secret worth killing for. But now Olivia wants to tell, and Naomi sets out to find out what really happened in the woods—no matter how dangerous the truth turns out to be.

• What Lies in the Woods by Kate Alice Marshall
• Published by: Macmillan Audio on January 17, 2023
• Genre: Thriller, mystery
• Listening length: 11 hours 29 minutes
• Dates listened: 5.26.25 – 6.2.25 (8 days)
• Format: Audiobook
• Narrator: Karissa Vacker
• Add on Goodreads
• Purchase on Amazon

---

Am I the only one who has ever finished a book, been prompted immediately by my app to give the book a rating, and without even giving it much thought, I click on the stars and promptly move along with my life; only to think about the book off and on over the new few days and realize…I don’t agree with that rating anymore? No? Just me! haha Well, that’s what happened for me with this book. My initial gut reaction was a 4-star rating, because I thought it was somewhat entertaining, and the biggest seller for a 4-star rating is that I didn’t predict anything that happened. That always makes me remove a star on thriller/mystery books.

But I’ve gotta say…the more that I thought about this book and allowed the plots to digest in my brain a bit, I ended up kind of confused and disappointed in the book. The book format is a typical thriller/mystery book, so nothing is surprising there. You follow along with the FMC as she tries to piece together details of an event that occurred to her 20 years ago when she was just 11 years old. There are a few plot twists dropped in here and there, but the big twists don’t happen until the last 5-10% of the book. And it’s here that I’m left scratching my head, trying to wrap my head around WTF just happened.

The more that I thought about the characters, the plots, the twists, and the conclusion….I’m sorry, but what?! First off, I didn’t really feel like any of the characters were likable or relatable, and personally, I felt they were all very superficial. On top of that, they were also very unreliable to me. The FMC, Naomi, comes off as this damaged woman who had this horrible thing happen to her that left her scarred, so she wears her scars as armor and never allows herself to get attached to anyone. She starts off in the book living with someone that she’s been in a relationship with for a while. They get into an argument the night she receives the news from one of her childhood friends about the death of her attacker, and she just up and decides the next morning, while he’s asleep, to leave. Doesn’t tell him she’s leaving, in her mind “it’s over” and that’s all there is to it, because she’s such a damaged and cold person, right? But then days (maybe weeks, the timeline was fuzzy) later, she’s hopping into bed and falling for/caring for a complete stranger, who ends up being the son of the man she put in prison for attacking her. Nope, don’t buy it!

Sometimes it seemed like the only thing I’d ever been good at was surviving being broken. I didn’t know how to be whole. So any time I felt like I was healing, I found a way to break myself again.

While we’re on the topic of the MMC…we learn that Naomi received a letter from the adult son of the man she put away in prison after her attack. In the letter, the son accuses Naomi and her friends of lying, of sending the wrong man to prison, and Naomi felt somewhat threatened by the letter. When Naomi returns to her town, we meet Ethan, a podcaster who is doing a story on the serial killer, whose last attack was on Naomi when she was playing out in the woods with her two best friends when they were 11 years old. Naomi initially gives him the cold shoulder, refusing to talk to him. After the death of one of her friends, whom the whole town is trying to say was suicide, but Naomi doesn’t believe it, she agrees to start working with Ethan to get to the bottom of everything. Over the course of the book, Naomi and Ethan grow closer, eventually sleeping together and caring about each other. Plot twist…Ethan is the adult son who sent the letter to Naomi!!! When she confronts him, he admits that he knew his father was a murderer, and that even if he wasn’t the one who attacked Naomi, he knows that his father did kill other women and should have gone to prison. He’s even thankful that Naomi and her friends lied about the attack, because if they hadn’t, his father would have gone on to hurt/kill more women. Uhm…if you knew all of that, then why would you even write the letter accusing her of sending the wrong man to prison? And if that’s how you felt about Naomi, why would you end up sleeping with the person you blame, but…then don’t blame? I’m so confused!

Those were just two of the inconsistencies I found in the book, but there were many, many more. Sure, the plot twists were shocking, but so far out there, they were way too unbelievable. Every single character did things that were a total 180 from what the author initially tells you about them, and in the end, once you learn all the details, you’re still trying to put the pieces of the puzzle together, and you realize they don’t fit. Overall, the book was just meh for me. I didn’t hate it, but also didn’t really like it, once I let it marinate in my head for a few days.