Parents Weekend
A Novel
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- 12,99 €
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- 12,99 €
Publisher Description
AN INSTANT NATIONAL BESTSELLER
From the bestselling author of If Something Happens to Me, comes one of the year’s most anticipated thrillers.
In the glow of their children’s exciting first year of college at a small private school in Northern California, five families gather over dinner and cocktails for the opening festivities of Parents Weekend. As the parents stay out way past their bedtimes, their kids—five residents of Campisi Hall—never show up to dinner.
At first, everyone thinks they’re just being college students, irresponsibly forgetting about the gathering or skipping out to go to a party. But as the hours tick by and another night falls with not so much as a text from the students, panic ensues. Soon the campus police call in reinforcements. Search parties are formed. Reporters swarm the small enclave. Rumors swirl and questions arise.
Libby, Blane, Mark, Felix, and Stella—The Five, as the podcasters, bloggers, and TikTok sleuths soon call them—come from very different families. What drew them out on that fateful night? Could it be the sins of their mothers and fathers come to cause them peril—or a threat to the friend group from within?
Told from each family’s point of view—and marking the return of FBI Special Agent Sarah Keller from Every Last Fear and The Night Shift—Parents Weekend explores the weight of expectation, family dysfunction, and those exhilarating first days in the dorms when friends become family.
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
What should have been a standard awkward weekend explodes into a pulse-pounding mystery in Alex Finlay’s multilayered thriller. Five college students blowing off a dinner with their folks during Parents Weekend wouldn’t normally warrant attention from FBI Special Agent Sarah Keller. In this case, though, a separate student has just been found dead and two of the missing have high-profile parents, including a State Department power player with plenty of enemies. Finlay keeps the perspective hopping between families and Keller’s investigation, revealing tensions and secrets that might factor into the disappearances. We loved the way the many tentacles snaked around, building sweaty anxiety before the true picture of what happened emerges. The indomitable Agent Keller, with her loving husband and cute twins, serves as the anchor that keeps the proceedings focused and grounded. Parents Weekend expertly plays on parental fears to deliver a thriller that pays off every thread with interest.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
An exclusive private school where CEOs, doctors, and government officials send their children gets shaken up by the disappearance of five students in Finlay's fleet if familiar latest thriller featuring FBI agent Sarah Keller (after The Night Shift). Troubled scholarship student Felix Goffman is an outlier at Northern California's prestigious Santa Clara University, but he and his dormmates have nevertheless become close friends. On the first night of Parents Weekend, the students and their parents agree to eat together. Annoyance turns to fear as the hours pass and the students fail to show up, especially because Natasha Belov, daughter of a wealthy businessman, has been recently found dead in a nearby sea cave. The case gets sent to Agent Keller, since U.S. assistant secretary of state Cynthia Roosevelt's son, Blane, is among the missing students. Blane's not the only child of a high-profile parent in the cohort: Libby Akana's father, judge Kenneth Akana, oversaw actor Rock Nelson's headline-grabbing domestic violence trial and angered the star's fans. Juggling those clues, Agent Keller races to uncover the truth as the case becomes an online sensation. Finlay writes in a conventional register, with red herrings galore, and he caps the proceedings with a particularly shocking conclusion. Fans of Mary Higgins Clark will enjoy themselves.
