Alissa Lee’s With Friends Like These is a propulsive thriller. It kept me fliipping pages late into the night and early again the next morning, all because I wanted to find out how things turn out. I also really like how Lee depicts the existential crisis that plagues many of us early 40s millennial women.

The narrator, Sara, and her friends all graduated from Harvard, which should have set them up on a life filled with nothing but success. But reality came to bite each of them in different ways: Sara gives up a high-paying banking job to pursue her dream of becoming a photographer, yet now at 43, money problems have her considering taking on a corporate photography gig instead. Allie has a happy family and a good job in marketing, but she had to give up her dream career as a teacher to get it. Even the friends who seem to have their lives together — Dina, a professor on the tenure track; Bee, a District Attorney running for mayor; and Wesley, a wild child trust fund heiress — seem to have more problems than at first glance. Lee does a fantastic job at revealing details about her characters’ lives layer by layer, and it becomes increasingly clear that none of them have the life they’d really wanted. Speaking as a woman also in my early 40s, that part of the story felt real and raw, and also very relatable.

The mystery part of the story isn’t bad. The five friends are doing one last hurrah of an annual tradition they’d had since college: a “killing” game held the first week of each January. Each woman draws a friend’s name as their first “target.” They “kill” the target by shooting a water pistol, and the person “killed” gives up a medallion with their initials to the “killer,” who then goes on to the next name on the list. Whoever collects all five medallions by the deadline wins that year’s game. Some of the women want to end the game, so they decide to make this their last year, winner take all. And thanks to some savvy investment just after college, the prize is up to almost a million dollars.

Challenge is that Sara starts seeing someone she’d thought long dead: their sixth college roommate, who’d died under mysterious circumstances while playing the game in college. And then some of the women start getting threatening notes telling them to stop the game or else. And for one of the women, the threat turns frighteningly real.

Is one of the players taking the game too far, or is it someone else after them all? The big reveals are easy enough to guess, and the resulting insights about the importance of friendship are just okay. But it’s still a propulsive read; Lee’s writing keeps you turning the pages.

The weak link of the book for me is the hook of the game itself, which required quite a tremendous suspension of disbelief on my part. The trope of a college tradition turned deadly is a fairly common one, and Lee’s version isn’t necessarily more over-the-top than others in this genre. Yet the gameplay itself sounds so miserable that it’s tough to believe this group of friends keeps it going for over two decades in the first place.

The game’s supposed purpose is to make them feel extra-alive, and remind them to live life to the fullest. I can imagine some college kids thinking that will be fun, and maybe even some adrenaline-loving adults. And yes, I can even buy that the real-life consequences (one of them breaks a leg one year, another ends up arrested another year) may be worth the risk of the adrenaline rush.

But the gameplay itself seems so filled with anxiety and so low in high-adrenaline fun that it’s hard to believe they kept it going for so long, especially since most of them didn’t even know about the money until the present-day game. For example, Sara describes herself and her friends as being extra twitchy and with bloodshot eyes, because their “killer” may be hiding behind the corner. Sara hasn’t taken a shower in almost a week, because apparently these friends like “shooting” each other in the shower. They’d even had to set up rules like kids are off-limits (one of the friends went so far as to kidnap another’s children one year) and fake emergencies are off-limits (past games have involved fire alarms and calls about loved ones in hospital). There are more rules created from extreme past behaviour that I can’t remember anymore, but yikes. Without the almost a million dollars cash pot, and with paranoia to the extent that you can’t even feel safe showering in your own bathroom…why would anyone put up with this for so long?

Like I said, it’s a tough sell, but overall a fun read regardless, and a relatable glimpse into some of the struggles of being 40 and realizing you haven’t actually fulfilled all the dreams you’d set out to do.

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Thank you to Simon and Schuster Canada for an e-galley in exchange for an honest review.