Shiver

By: Allie Reynolds

Narrated by: Olivia Vinall

Length: 10 hrs and 22 mins

Publisher's Summary

In this propulsive locked-room thriller debut, a reunion weekend in the French Alps turns deadly when five friends discover that someone has deliberately stranded them at their remote mountaintop resort during a snowstorm.

When Milla accepts an off-season invitation to Le Rocher, a cozy ski resort in the French Alps, she's expecting an intimate weekend of catching up with four old friends. It might have been a decade since she saw them last, but she's never forgotten the bond they forged on this very mountain during a winter spent fiercely training for an elite snowboarding competition. 

Yet no sooner do Milla and the others arrive for the reunion than they realize something is horribly wrong. The resort is deserted. The cable cars that delivered them to the mountaintop have stopped working. Their cell phones - missing. And inside the hotel, detailed instructions await them: an icebreaker game, designed to draw out their secrets. A game meant to remind them of Saskia, the enigmatic sixth member of their group, who vanished the morning of the competition years before and has long been presumed dead.

Stranded in the resort, Milla's not sure what's worse: the increasingly sinister things happening around her or the looming snowstorm that's making escape even more impossible. All she knows is that there's no one on the mountain she can trust. Because someone has gathered them there to find out the truth about Saskia...someone who will stop at nothing to get answers. And if Milla's not careful, she could be the next to disappear....

©2021 Allie Reynolds (P)2021 Penguin Audio

Critic Reviews

"Deep in the breathtaking winter bleakness of the French Alps, revenge - and perhaps even murder - is most definitely afoot.... This suspenseful debut thriller by a former freestyle snowboarder contains both style and substance." (Kirkus Reviews, starred review) 

“[A] gripping debut thriller...Reynolds writes with the same fast-paced intensity of an energy drink-fueled trip down the slopes. Alongside its central mystery, Shiver offers an intimate look at the convoluted relationships of athletes who excel at a sport most people are too cautious even to attempt--including what happens when the truth becomes inescapable, both because of the blizzard and other equally unpredictable forces.” (Shelf Awareness)

“Allie Reynolds’ aptly named debut Shiver sent chills up my spine! This taut and twisty thriller follows five former snowboarding champions trapped in a deserted ski resort, each hiding dark secrets about their shared past that pit them against one another. Cancel all your plans because once you pick up this page turner, you won't be able to put it down until you've reached its shocking conclusion!" (Katherine St. John, author of The Lion’s Den)

Same words Diff book.

I get a credit every month and hope every month that this time I will find a good story and a good narrator.I use this service every single night to block out a snoring husband.So this is important to me but I keep getting books I can not even finish.I read the reviews and google search good audio books etc but every time it turns out to be not a good experience.So now they wont let me trade it and honestly its an ok story and the narrator was actually someone could listen to but the story just didn't grab me at all.Maybe it will be diff for you.To each their own and all that.Guess its back to the audible plus catalogue for a month .And I will not even comment on those right now.

Not Good!!

Too hard to follow. To much Snowboarding talk.
Took far too long to develop. I kept wanting to quit
and return the book. I stayed with it until the end.
I DO NOT RECOMMEND IT.

What did I miss?

Everything about this book is so juvenile I can’t believe it’s not classified as YA, no offense to teen readers. From the soap operatic storyline to the flat characters to the insipid dialogue, this is a loser from the get-go. To add insult to injury, the author manages to wring out more than 10 hours of this drivel. Don’t be fooled. Run, don’t walk, away from this mess of a book. Reading a cereal box would be more entertaining.

Must read!

First five star of 2021. Great suspense, I enjoyed the past/present format. Perfect narration as well.

Doesn't work

The main character has the same inner dialog from start to finish. She was incredibly annoying. Think Nancy Drew. There are so many other trapped at a remote location that is worthy of your time. Skip it.

Not worth it

Ending was not worth the suffering through this audiobook- narration and performance were good. The story was just meh.

NOTHING NEW HERE

The story is long and boring, some of which is due to the endless details about snowboarding, which the author assumed her readers knew nothing about and/or would be fascinated with. Also, the concept of a group of people trapped in a cabin together after a murder lost its fascination many years ago. The narrator did a nice job with what she had to work with. I did not finish this book.

Pretty good

So, I "really liked" this book. I probably would have given the story more like 3 1/2 stars (vs 4) but Audible won't let me. The author does a great job of setting a truly creepy scene ~ isolated ski resort in the Swiss Alps unoccupied except for a small group of old snowboarding friends who are there for a grim reunion of sorts and find themselves completely cut off from civilization and being toyed with by unknown forces from page one. The traumatic event from ten years ago that links the friends to one another lends a mystery to the story that is carried out beautifully up to the end. Without giving anything away, what I liked the most about this book was the psychological warfare that takes place as the friends are trapped together during this snowstorm and the ghosts of their pasts compete with the ghost of the present and slowly "undo" them. The author does a great job at unraveling the situation slowly and giving us insight into the internal head games of each character. She does such a good job at it, that I kind of expected more to the ending. I won't say how it ends, but it is yet another book where the author was reaching so hard to make it unexpected, it's almost insultingly unbelievable. Personally, I'd rather have a little idea of "who done it" or "how it was done" than to be handed a scenario that is almost ridiculously unbelievable. But, that's just me. It was consistently a compulsive read up to the "eye roll ending" so I would recommend it. The narrator was good, too.

absolutely fantastic!

loved it! what a suspenseful story! The contrast of present and past in the telling of the story was brilliant and left me not wanting to stop listening because I needed answers! great job Allie Reynolds! looking forward to reading many more books from you.

Atmospheric and suspenseful!

This is a compulsively readable novel, and the narrator was fabulous. I'll be thinking about the last few lines for a while.