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:

Simmering, sinister, and seductive!

A Death at the Party is a character-driven, domestic thriller that takes you into the life of Nadine Walsh, a mother of two who, after ending the night of her mother’s sixtieth birthday party and the thirtieth anniversary of her aunt’s tragic death standing over the body of a dead man, takes us back to the start of the day and into all the deception, infidelities, suspicions, and deviant behaviours that led her there.

The prose is intricate and intense. The characters are unreliable, secretive, and consumed. And the plot unfolds and unravels briskly into a murky tale full of twists, turns, surprises, familial drama, manipulation, resentments, scandal, wickedness, depravity, vengeance, and murder.

Overall, A Death at the Party is a tight, devious, relentless tale by Stuart that delves into the complex bonds that exist between friends and family members and reminds us that behind all those happy, smiling faces often lies an abundance of destructive lies and devastating secrets.

This book is available now.

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