A Death at the Party by Amy Stuart | Review

A Death at the Party | Amy Stuart Simon & Schuster | Pub: March 7, 2023 | Pages: 304

A Death at the Party is an intriguing neighbourhood suspense that takes place over the course of one day, and was divided into three segments: morning, afternoon, and evening.

In the first chapter, Nadine discovers a body in her cellar while her elegant garden party is taking place upstairs.

Since the book is divided into three segments, the following chapter goes back to the morning of the party where Nadine is preparing for her mother's birthday party with her close friends and family. For me, this was the slowest portion, but as the day wore on and we got closer to the celebration that night, things started to take up.

Since the chapters are brief, you can finish this book pretty quickly. Along the way, there were also some fantastic twists. I was left wondering because the identity of the body wasn't revealed until the very end. The author skillfully weaves together all of the moving components.

This book was pretty good! Although it started out a little slow for my liking, once the story progressed, I found myself unable to put it down.

Thank you to Simon & Schuster Canada for providing me with an electronic ARC of this book via NetGalley. As usual, my reviews are my honest and unbiased opinions.

Synopsis

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.

@anintrovertreads

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