The Fourth Girl is a good rendition of a rather common concept. If you’re looking for the kind of story you can sink into without being totally absorbed by it, this will be perfect for you.

Their group name was TICK. Tallia. Imogene. Caroline. Kelly. Friends forever – or so they swore. They even got bracelets and other memorabilia made with the acronym because hey, it was the nineties, and fun, cutesy friendship rituals were in style. But by senior year, their quartet had become (primarily) a threesome. Caroline’s extremely religious parents had tightened the reins, and there were limits on where she could go and whom she could hang out with. Gordy, the son of their best friends from church, was an acceptable companion. The three girls she’d hung out with forever? Not so much. But prom night senior year finds all four girls at a wild party at Haven Cliff, an abandoned mansion at the edge of town. Only three of them come home.

A secret is a secret, and a promise is a promise. That’s what they always said, but whatever secrets and promises were made at Haven Cliff have imploded their friendship. Midge (Imogene) stays in Mulberry Bay, attends community college, and joins the police force. Kelly avoids her hometown for two decades but returns when her mother’s illness means she needs full-time care. Talia, a happy mom living far away with her family, doesn’t return until she (reluctantly) agrees to join them for what is sure to be an awkward reunion on the twenty-fifth anniversary of Caroline’s disappearance.

Thanks to Kelly’s lucrative divorces, Haven Cliff has been completely refurbished. In a burst of celebratory fervor, and with the desire to figure out how to reignite their lost connection, Kelly invites Midge and Talia to gather at the spot where all their lives were irrevocably changed. The lush estate house is nothing like it was that night so many years ago when a young girl left it, never to be seen again. Neither are the three women who were that girl’s closest companions, who have stayed quiet about the truth of that evening. After all, secrets and promises are meant to be kept – but someone else has also borne this secret for twenty-five years, and they’ve had enough of suffering in silence.

Girlfriends with secrets has probably been a trope for as long as murder mysteries have been written – I’ve certainly read my share of novels with this premise. The Fourth Girl follows the basic pattern of these stories to a tee, delivering a somewhat predictable tale about four teens trying to solve an adult-sized problem, muddling it up, and then a reunion years later to finally hash it all out. The formula is so familiar that it’s basically connect the dots at this point, and the only variables tend to be how interesting the secret is, how complex the characters are, and how well the author executes the whole scenario.

Unfortunately, the characters aren’t really all that complicated. Like most girl groups, this one comprises the rebel (Kelly), the sporty girl-next-door (Midge), band geek, Talia, and sweet, innocent Caroline. I had some struggles with how these four were represented, both as individuals and as a cohesive unit. I couldn’t figure out, for one thing, why they were still friends in high school – or how they became friends at all, honestly. Mulberry is a small town, so more overlap than in a larger city would be expected, but these ladies still come from widely dissimilar backgrounds and social strata. Kelly’s family has the kind of money where belonging to a club and having a housekeeper is par for the course, whereas Talia is the daughter of a single mom working as a waitress. Kelly is an atheist, drinker, and flirt, while Caroline’s family is meant to belong to a Duggar-esque cult. It made no sense to me that a girl whose folks wouldn’t tolerate a TV in their home sent their daughter to a public school. I know these kinds of families, and when you’re that fundamentalist, you homeschool or send your kids to a Christian school. As a real-life group of pals, they didn’t work for me, especially not at the level of closeness they allegedly shared.

Midge, whose part in the teenage portion of the story is very limited, seems to be involved only for the pivotal role she plays in the present-day part of the tale because being a cop gives her access to the information needed for the final denouement. However, her character seems to be the antithesis of what is typical for a detective in reality or fiction. She lacks the pivotal trait of curiosity, probably because it would have brought the whole plot to an end if she had been proactive as either an adult or a child because . . . the secret wasn’t worth keeping for twenty-fice years. Perhaps back in the sixties, but not so much by the nineties, especially given the girls’ ages. Had they still been freshmen or sophomores, maybe, but it was senior year, and less dramatic options than their chosen solution were available. Also, all the parents except Caroline’s are shown to be kind, decent people. They would have helped the girls fix the relatively minor foible they were caught up in.

The book is still very readable despite the ho-hum, barely-worth-gossiping-about secret and rather stock characters. The dual timeline nature of the novel, which switches from 1998/1999 to the present day, helps to prolong the discovery of what’s actually happening, and plenty of red herrings are thrown in to keep the reader guessing about a few points until near the end. The smooth prose and good pacing will have you invested, if not necessarily enthralled.

The Fourth Girl is one of those books that ended up being a bit more than the sum of its parts, because the author uses considerable skill in mixing her rather mediocre ingredients. If this premise is catnip for you (and given the plethora of novels with this plot, I’m assuming it must have oodles of fans), then you could do worse than give this one a go. Especially given the low price in today’s exorbitant (one might go so far as to say extortionist) book market.