YOU ARE FATALLY INVITED
ANDE PLIEGO
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Six thriller authors. One writing retreat.
You’d die to be on the guest list . . .
The Host
Legendary mystery author J. R. Alastor’s books are sold all over the world, but no one knows his real name. After years hiding in the shadows, he has sent out six invitations to an exclusive murder mystery retreat on his private island.
The Assistant
Mila del Angél has been hired to ensure the week runs smoothly. She has yearned for revenge on a ghost from her past for years – and this could be her chance to get it.
The Players
The six bestselling thriller writers accept their invitations without question – it’s an opportunity any author would kill for.
The Game
What should have been a week of trope-filled games takes a sinister turn when one guest is found dead, and the others find themselves in the midst of a nightmare drawn from Alastor’s dark imagination. They may have written thrillers – but now they and Mila must survive one...
MY REVIEW
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I love a good murder mystery, and I love a good read, so a murder mystery set in a writer’s retreat full of famous authors sounded ideal!
Six thriller authors have been invited to the remote house of anonymous author J.R. Alastor to take part in a writer’s retreat. Featuring dinner games and writing tips, this was an opportunity not to be missed. But when a writer goes missing, the authors realise the stakes may be higher than they expected…
It’s taken me a little while to write this review after reading it and I was initially unsure why. I think ultimately, although I absolutely love the premise, this book missed the mark for me in some areas which was disappointing. We are introduced to a lot of points of view at once, with each chapter having a different narrator, out of the six authors, one housekeeper and a mysterious narrator who is not revealed until the end. This felt like a bit of an overload to begin with, and I found it hard to keep track of the characters and work out who was who, and what each person’s relationship was to each other. They are all written quite similarly as well which made this job even harder. The characters remained my issue throughout – the plot works well to keep you guessing who the perpetrator could be – in fact, we’d gotten down to the last two and I still hadn’t really guessed! It does this by sacrificing any empathy you have for the characters though – I didn’t really feel that I was rooting for anyone by the end.
The plot starts well, with a game before dinner which sets a somewhat darker tone on the proceedings. However, I found the games a little confusing. We seemed to go from zero to one hundred very quickly, whereas I would have preferred a slower pace where we could introduce some more normal events of the writing retreat before the twists started to be revealed. Although the ending did tie things together, it did rely quite heavily on tell-not-show, where one character monologues a lot of events that the reader wouldn’t have been able to work out or guess to make the plot make sense.
Overall, You Are Fatally Invited didn’t quite hit the mark for me sadly, it was a great premise but had some pitfalls trying to create a twisting narrative. Thank you to Netgalley & Random House UK, Transworld Publishers and Bantam for the chance to read the ARC in exchange for an honest review.
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