BOOK SYNOPSIS
Everyone’s invited. Someone will never leave.
In a grand townhouse rented specially for the evening, Hannah beams at her guests under the sparkling chandelier. Her sisters, her mother and aunt, her best friends… although she’ll miss them all so much when she moves away, tonight is about celebrating the happy times and raising a toast to the future.
But the next morning, one of the guests is found cold and lifeless in their pristine white bed.
Hannah is desperate to call the police. After all, it must have been an accident. Perhaps too much wine, on a night where emotions were running high. But it soon becomes clear that every single person at the party has something to hide.
A mother who’ll do anything for her daughters.
Best friends with dark secrets between them.
A sister with a jealous streak.
What if one of them is a killer?
And what if this is just the first victim?
The story opens with the discovery of the victim's body and then slips back in time to sixteen hours earlier and the reader is introduced to the eight women who were attending the party (which according to Hannah wasn't actually a party but she had planned some games that they could play,which is exactly what you normally do at a party...isn't it???) But as readers would discover as the story unfolded, Hannah was a rather indecisive individual and quite often lacked the maturity of her years. The reason for the party (which wasn't a party) was that Hannah was planning on going travelling using the money that she had inherited when her gran had passed away. She felt that she needed a change in her life, a decision which hadn't gone down very well with her sister Beth who thought that Hannah should be spending the money more wisely. To be honest,if I had a mother who behaved like Hannah's mother Alison then I would have wanted to get as far away as possible at the earliest opportunity. If you combined Ma Baker, Ma Boswell and Bonnie Parker into one individual, you wouldn't even be close to describing Alison's attitude and behaviour. Alison was at the party along with Hannah's Aunt Dawn and cousin Sophie plus Alison's friend Janet, there was also Hannah's sisters Beth and Charlotte and a character called Katherine who had once been a close friend of Hannah's. From the moment that the group arrived at the luxurious house that they had rented for the night, the air was infused with a undercurrent of tension and foreboding. As the drinks flowed,there was times when you could cut the atmosphere with a knife as hidden secrets and grievances were revealed and by the next morning one of the women would be dead. But, who was the victim and what was the motive behind her death? Why do some of the women insist that Hannah doesn't contact the emergency services and what the hell are they going to do with the body?
Meanwhile a individual called Zack was having concerns because he couldn't get in contact with his girlfriend. She had told him that she had been invited to a friend's leaving party and would text him when she wanted picking up. Only he hadn't heard from her and she wasn't answering his texts or calls. Certain that something was terribly wrong, Zack begins his own investigation into her disappearance. I had mixed feelings about Zack and the author cleverly added a air of mystery and suspicion to his character by not making it abundantly clear what the dynamics of the relationship between Zack and the missing woman actually were. One part of Zack's story that I really loved were the interactions between him and Linda who was his boss at the coffee shop where he worked and was my favourite character to feature in this book.
This is not a action packed story, it's more of a study of the relationships and interactions between the various characters who appear within the book and how their lives are affected by the incident at number 12. As well as the seven women who had attended the party there was also a number of other viable suspects who could have been involved in the victim's death including a ex husband, ex boyfriend and a seriously creepy individual called Jeff who was the owner of the house were the party was being held. The plot contains a number of unexpected twists and turns including one which added a classic murder mystery vibe to be story. I can't say that I enjoyed this book as much as I did some of Kerry Wilkinson's previous titles but that won't deter me from reading more of his books in the future.
AUTHOR INFO
Kerry Wilkinson is from the English county of Somerset but has spent far too long living in the north. It’s there that he’s picked up possibly made-up regional words like ‘barm’ and ‘ginnel’. He pretends to know what they mean.
He’s also been busy since turning thirty: his Jessica Daniel crime series has sold more than a million copies in the UK; he has written a fantasy-adventure trilogy for young adults; a second crime series featuring private investigator Andrew Hunter and the standalone thriller, Down Among The Dead Men.
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