The Ski Trip by Sarah Clarke is the story of Ivy, a new single-mother, friend-ish of Zoe, Zoe’s husband, Tom, and several other friends from their long-ago university years.

Ivy receives a somewhat out of the blue call from Zoe requesting/begging her go to France because of Tom’s death on ski trip with several other of their mutual friends. Being a new mother, and Zoe being a somewhat estranged friend, the request is awkward. Ivy’s anxiety-ridden mother isn’t really in a good shape to look after Ivy’s son, but Ivy is insistent, desperate and…  

In France, Ivy doubts and then questions most of what has happened, who was involved and why. Tom was an excellent skier; could he really have skied off a well-marked cliff? The slope wasn’t dangerous and relationships within the group of friends were strained in the days before his ‘fall’. Ivy suspects foul play and so does the police chief, but there’s no evidence. Ivy is torn between justice for Tom and getting home to help her son and her anxious mother.

This is a crisply-written story, broken into well-structured chapters that kept me reading quickly. The characters’ back stories (their university and early career years) are credible and interesting; and flawed. Everyone is a suspect.

I really enjoyed reading this; it was a cut-above the rest of the simple, present-day whodunit genre. And I LOVED the twist at the end, followed by the extra twist in the last page.