The Group Chat

The killer is typing...

Sydneysiders Briar, Harriett and Zara are bonded for life. They're firm friends who all met on a Facebook bereavement support forum after having lost close family members, and soon took their shared gallows humour offline, sharing tales of what they'd been through over a cocktail or three.

When they're not gossiping in person they're chatting on their private WhatsApp group chat. It's a safe space for all three of them to vent. Sometimes about grief, but more often than not about their kids' latest escapades, or what their husband's done to annoy them.

Speaking of which, Briar's husband has asked her if she'll start to include one of his colleagues' wives in her friend group, and to put it lightly, she's not thrilled. Granted, she has sympathy for how hard relocating for your husband's job without knowing anyone must be. But Alex is just so... stuffy. And boring. And if she's honest, a bit weird? First, she's copying Briar's style, getting an eerily similar haricut and buying the same handbags, and next she's turning up to every single event in her calendar. Before she knows it Alex has even charmed Harriett and Zara and been added, destroying the sanctity of her own group chat.

Uneasy, Briar nonetheless decided to try and make the best of it. If Alex is in the group chat now, she figures the girl she works with - Effie - may as well be too. At least Briar actually likes her.

Soon the quintet are going on a weekend away up the Coast, but the rural idyll is quickly shattered when the next-door neighbour to their holiday cottage is found brutally murdered. Harriett and Zara think Briar is stark raving mad for even suggesting it, but she can't shake the hunch that Alex might have had something to do with it. And when more and more things in her life start going wrong, her suspicion only intensifies.

Will they find the real culprit before it's too late? Or will the bereavement group end up being the cause of an altogether different untimely demise?