The Wasp Trap
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3.8 • 26 Ratings
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
“So clever and fresh with a wild and incredibly satisfying twist at the end.” —Lisa Jewell, #1 New York Times bestselling author
A dinner party in a beautiful Notting Hill townhouse turns into a sinister game, as six old friends are forced to spill their darkest secrets . . . or else.
Six friends reunite in London to celebrate the life of their recently deceased ex-employer, a professor that brought them together in 1999 to help build a dating website based on psychological testing.
But what is meant to be a night of bittersweet nostalgia soon becomes a twisted and deadly game when the old friends are given an ultimatum: reveal their darkest secrets to the group or pick each other off one-by-one.
It soon becomes clear that their current predicament is related to their shared past. The love questionnaire they helped develop in 1999 for the dating site was also turned into a tool for weeding out psychopaths: The Wasp Trap. This and the other tragic events of that summer long ago may help reveal the truth behind a killer hiding in plain sight.
Alternating between the past and present, The Wasp Trap is a stingingly sharp thriller perfect for fans of Lucy Foley and Riley Sager.
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
Six friends find themselves confronting their pasts and each other in this modern twist on the locked-room mystery. When failed writer Will arrives at the posh home of his old friends Georgina and Theo to celebrate the life of their former mentor, he only hopes for one thing: a chance to repair his relationship with Sophie, the love of his life. However, when the house unexpectedly enters lockdown and cell service ceases, Will and his friends must figure out exactly whose game they are playing if they want to survive the night. Secrets and past indiscretions permeate this unputdownable thriller. Alternating between 1999 and the present, author Mark Edwards slowly dishes out each shocking revelation, culminating in an amazing final twist that had us ready to start reading again from the very beginning. Don’t plan anything for the day you read The Wasp Trap, because once you start, you won’t want to stop until the very end.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Six former colleagues reunite after the death of their mentor in this propulsive suspense novel from Edwards (The Psychopath Next Door). In 1999, former psychology professor Sebastian Marlowe recruited six recent university grads to work at a digital startup headquartered in his English country estate. The project, inspired by Sebastian's obsessive study of love in the months after his wife's murder, was an early algorithmic dating app. Twenty-five years later, Sebastian is dead, and his former employees reunite for his memorial. Among them is Lily, who worked with Sebastian on a side project to help identify sociopaths and shared a traumatic experience with the professor that both agreed to keep buried forever. During dinner, two of Sebastian's current employees take the group hostage and insist they reveal their darkest secrets. They're pursuing cryptic information that Sebastian alluded to on his deathbed—which Lily fears might be the very secret that could ruin her life. Edwards has a nasty good time airing his cast's dirty laundry, stoking plot momentum with big and small revelations that are almost universally unpredictable. This will keep readers turning pages well into the night.
