A Death at the Party

February 20, 2023
Virginia Woolf meets Agatha Christie in this taut psychological thriller from Stuart (Still Here). Around midnight in a basement bathroom, Nadine Walsh, who’s hosting a birthday party upstairs for her 60-year-old mother, a bestselling thriller writer, checks the pulse of an unidentified dying man. After he dies, Nadine, who lives in “Winngrove, an affluent-but-liberal village within a city,” returns to the party without being spotted leaving the basement. Flashbacks starting early that morning follow Nadine as she prepares for more than a hundred guests that evening. Her lawyer husband doesn’t help much, nor do their two self-absorbed teenage children. She feels judged by her 24-year-old niece, who has lived with the Walshes since Nadine fell down the stairs and broke her hip six months before. She also contends with her unresolved feelings for her rags to riches mother and the lingering trauma of a family tragedy that occurred exactly 30 years earlier. Stuart’s complex lead immediately grabs the reader’s sympathy, even if she is a killer. Fans of Mrs. Dalloway, which provides the book’s epigraph, will want to check this one out. Agent: Samantha Haywood, Transatlantic Agency (Canada).

Starred review from April 1, 2023
A man is dead on the bathroom floor, and we know that Nadine killed him. She accomplished this while playing hostess to the 100 guests she invited to her mother's sixtieth birthday party. Nadine's hair is a little out of place but her lipstick is perfect, and she rejoins her guests, chic and composed in her black silk jumpsuit. Who is the dead man and why did she kill him? She and her husband and their two teenage children have close ties to many in the group, including the man Nadine had an affair with. Is it "vile, vile Lionel"? In a brilliantly plotted and elegantly told tale, the reader lives through one day in Nadine's life, the day of the party, a day that reveals how full of deception her life has become. Some of the lies are old, but some of them are new, dangerous and shocking enough to make her head reel as she prepares for the event. And the truths she uncovers that evening drive her to take a man's life with no remorse and no mind to the consequences. Stuart's first book was an instant best-seller in her native Canada, and this stand-alone, a departure from her Clare O'Dey series, may well have the same success in the U.S. Recommend it to fans of Lisa Jewell and Shari Lapena.

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