Emily Donovan and Kristen Czarnecki have been besties since college at Northwestern University. They’re still tight ten years later, even though Emily now lives in Milwaukee and Kristen is halfway around the world in Sydney.

One of the ways they stay close is by taking a girls’ trip each year to an exotic location. This year’s trip is to Chile. Their carefree trek through the rural Andes takes a left turn, though, when Emily returns to their hotel room to find Kristen covered in blood and a dead backpacker on the floor. Kristen says the backpacker attacked her and she had no choice but to kill him. Now, she insists, Emily must help her dispose of the body.

Back in Milwaukee, guilt about what happened in Chile dogs Emily, and she can’t understand why Kristen is so nonchalant about it. Then Kristen unexpectedly shows up at Emily’s front door all the way from Australia. And, it seems, Kristen pops up everywhere Emily goes. She’s even intruding on Emily’s time with her new boyfriend, Aaron. Digging a little, she begins to uncover some troubling information about the Kristen she thought she knew. Is Kristen’s version of events in Chile the way things really happened? Is Kristen’s friendship becoming an obsession?

Emily narrates We Were Never Here in the first person. It’s an engaging story even if one or two of the reveals toward the end are predictable. But Emily indulges in so much hand-wringing and overthinking that, for me at least, it affected the pace of the story. Guilt and fear of discovery permeate her thoughts, and her brooding occasionally edges toward misandry. This may be a ploy to ratchet up the tension, but it often has the opposite effect of taking the reader on a detour from the action. The denouement isn’t entirely unexpected, but it’s not completely predictable, either.

Fortunately, as the action reaches a climax, the side trips into Emily’s psyche are less intrusive and the book starts to feel more like the thriller it’s supposed to be. If you like the genre, you should enjoy this book.