A Death at the Party

This thriller starts out with a bang ... and a murder. The story unfolds over the course of one day as our main character Nadine gets ready to host a 60th birthday party for her mother Marilyn Millay, a famous novelist.

Through flashbacks, we witness secrets from Nadine and Marilyn's pasts and how they impact their lives today. With a confessional tone to Nadine's POV and a building sense of dread, the story is perfectly paced with red herrings, family tragedy and long-held secrets that Stuart weaves into a compelling story. I concur with the book's blurb that A Death at the Party is a perfect read for fans of Lisa Jewell and Canadian author Ashley Audrain.

This was an engrossing read with delightfully short chapters that I read in a couple of sittings and is a must read for domestic suspense fans.

My Rating: 4.5 stars

Author: Amy Stuart

Genre: Suspense, Domestic Thriller

Type and Source: Trade Paperback from public library

Publisher: Simon and Schuster

First Published: March 7, 2023

Book Description from GoodReads: In this tense, spellbinding thriller set over the course of a single day, a woman prepares for a party that goes dreadfully wrong—for fans of Ashley Audrain and Lisa Jewell.

Nadine Walsh’s summer garden party is in full swing. The neighbors all have cocktails, the catered food is exquisite—everything’s going according to plan.

But Nadine—devoted wife, loving mother, and doting daughter—finds herself standing over a dead body in her basement while her guests clink glasses upstairs. What happened? How did it come to this?

Rewind to that morning, when Nadine is in her kitchen, making last-minute preparations before she welcomes more than a hundred guests to her home to celebrate her mother’s birthday. But her husband is of little help to her, her two grown children are consumed with their own concerns, and her mother—only her mother knows that today isn’t just a birthday party. It marks another anniversary as well.

Still, Nadine will focus just on tonight. Everyone deserves a celebration after the year they’ve had. A chance for fun. A chance to forget. But it’s hard to forget when Nadine’s head is swirling with secrets, haunting memories, and concerns about what might happen when her guests unite.