I received an ARC of Before Black Ridge in exchange for an honest review. All opinions are my own.
I’m going to start with the thing I always want to know when I read a review: Did it actually hook me? Not immediately.
Before Black Ridge took me a little bit to get into. The beginning wasn’t bad by any means, but it took me a minute to settle into the story and figure out exactly where it was taking me. Once I became invested in Mara and Claire, though, that changed. At some point I stopped reading because I wanted answers and started reading because I cared about these two girls. And honestly, that ended up being the strongest part of the entire book for me.
Mara and Claire Made This Book
We meet Mara and Claire when they’re eleven, and their friendship feels lived in instead of manufactured for the sake of the plot.
It’s the little things that did it for me. Band-Aids. Spaghetti. Sleepovers. Stupid arguments. The rules they make for their friendship because they’re kids and apparently believe rules can keep people from leaving.
Mara especially got me. She’s sarcastic, defensive, angry, funny, and carrying things an eleven-year-old shouldn’t have to carry. But she never felt like an adult character shoved into a child’s body just to make the dialogue sound clever.
Claire becomes this safe place for her, and watching that relationship develop is what made everything later in the book hit as hard as it did. By then, I wasn’t nearly as interested in whether I could trust these characters as I was in what happens when the person you trust most starts becoming someone you don’t recognize.
The Mystery Worked, But This Is Where It Lost a Star
There is a lot happening underneath their friendship. Missing women, old records, names, dates, initials, family connections, buried evidence, people who know more than they’re willing to say, and a trail leading toward Black Ridge, Tennessee.
I liked the mystery itself. I wanted to know what happened and how all of these pieces connected. But the middle got long for me.
There are a LOT of names, dates, initials, locations, old connections, and conversations about what a clue might mean. Then new information changes what the previous information might have meant, and everyone has to reconsider it again. At times, I felt like we were circling the same questions instead of moving forward.
This is probably going to depend heavily on the reader. If you love picking apart clues and keeping track of every little connection, you may eat that part up. For me, I was much more emotionally invested in Mara, Claire, and Diane than I was in solving every individual piece of the mystery. I think tightening some of that middle section would have made this an even stronger read for me.
And Then There’s That Ending…
No spoilers. But I was PISSED. 😂 And I mean that as a compliment.
There is a choice made near the end of this book that I desperately wanted the author to undo. I kept waiting.
Surely we aren’t doing this.
Okay, now fix it.
…Hello???
She doesn’t fix it. And honestly? I respect the hell out of that.
It would have been incredibly easy to soften what happens or give the reader an escape hatch. Instead, the book commits to what these characters have become and makes you sit with it.
That ending works because you’ve spent so much time learning exactly what Mara and Claire mean to each other. You know their history. You know their rules. You know the things they’ve survived together. You know who always comes back. Until someone doesn’t.
And Claire… girl. At one point I wanted to throw her in traffic, so there’s that. 😂
Final Thoughts
Before Black Ridge wasn’t a perfect read for me. It took me a little while to get hooked, and I think the middle could have been tightened considerably. There were moments when the mystery became complicated enough that I cared less about keeping every name and connection straight and more about getting back to the characters.
But the character work is what carried this one for me.
Mara and Claire’s relationship feels complicated, loving, frustrating, and eventually devastating. The book also does something I appreciate in darker fiction: it allows two ugly, contradictory things to be true at the same time. Loving someone does not automatically mean you will do right by them. Being loved by someone does not mean they cannot hurt you.
And sometimes there isn’t a neat little explanation that makes what someone did easier to swallow.
That emotional payoff is why I landed at four stars despite my issues with the pacing.
If you like character-driven mysteries, complicated female friendships, family secrets, childhood bonds that follow people into adulthood, and endings that are perfectly willing to make you mad, Before Black Ridge is worth checking out.
Rating: ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ / 5
What worked for me: Mara and Claire’s friendship, Mara’s characterization, the emotional weight, the darker themes, and an ending that actually committed to its choices.
What didn’t work as well for me: The slower start, the length of the middle, and the sheer number of names, dates, initials, and connections I had to keep straight.
Would I read Nicole Anne Smith again? Absolutely. But I’m still mad at Claire. 😂