Review: A Death at the Party

Title: A Death at the Party
Author: Amy Stuart
Genre: Thriller, Contemporary
Publisher: Simon and Schuster Canada
Source: Publisher
Format: Paperback
Release Date: March 7, 2023
Rating: ★★★★★

Goodreads Synopsis:

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.

Review:

Nadine Walsh is hosting a sixtieth birthday party for her mother, the bestselling author Marilyn Millay. The hundred guest party is a success, with drinks flowing, beautiful decor, and delicious food. However, at the end of the party, Nadine is left standing over a body in her basement. This story follows the entire day leading up to the party, which Nadine spends rehashing events from her mother’s birthday party thirty years earlier when her aunt Colleen was found dead, up until the party with another dead body. 

This story was thrilling and fast paced. There were loads of hints of dark secrets to come in the first chapters. Everyone had secrets in their small community, and everyone was connected in some way. The story opens with Nadine standing over a dying man at the end of the party, but we don’t know who he is yet. There were so many possibilities as to who he could be that I was still guessing until the end. 

My only critique is that I want to know what happens next! I thought the story would still have a couple of more chapters when it ended. I would love to hear what happened after that final chapter. 

A Death at the Party is a great new thriller!

Thank you Simon and Schuster Canada and Tandem Collective for sending me a copy of this book. 

Content warnings: death, death of teenager, drugging, suggestion of sexual assault, mention of child pornography, extramarital affair

What to read next:

Have you read A Death at the Party? What did you think of it?