I received a digital advance reader’s copy (ARC) of You Are Fatally Invited by Ande Pliego. Since this version is just a proof and not the final version, I won’t quote directly and will keep my comments general.

In You Are Fatally Invited by Ande Pliego, a group of mystery authors are invited to a writing retreat on an island off the coast of Maine. They vaguely know each other, since in a way, they’re all colleagues, but none has ever met their host, J. R. Alastor, in person. Alastor’s been famously anonymous for his entire career, and now is conspicuously absent from his own house. Instead, there’s Mila, the event coordinator hired by Alastor, who tries to keep the retreat under control. However, Mila has a secret: she’s working with Alastor to take down all of these authors, who have each committed some kind of crime. And Mila’s planning to kill the one who personally wronged her—that is, until a dead body shows up, and it isn’t the one she wanted dead. Mila realizes that Alastor has his own homicidal plans, and has to anticipate him in order to survive. After all, she knows too much of his plan already, and likely won’t get out of there alive herself. But who really is Alastor, she wonders, and are they on the island with her?

I have to say, the description of this really intrigued me. It’s like a combination of And Then There Were None and the movie Clue (though far less goofy than that). And overall, I enjoyed this.

I think that the first half of the book is fine, with lots of character introductions and backstory, with the plot progressing like the aforementioned Agatha Christie masterpiece. However, it doesn’t quite hold up to its obvious inspiration. The plot of this relies a lot on mystery/thriller tropes, in a very metafictional way that, at times, is almost too self-aware. It’s like Pliego is trying to twist or comment on these tropes, but instead is merely relying on them without doing too much to push against or do much original with them.

However, I enjoyed the second half of the book more. The tropes started to be less heavy-handed, and the story started to feel more original, all while the tension and stakes were growing. I also really enjoyed how the narration, which shifted between several different characters, was able to keep suspense by hiding certain revelations until the right moment. And the pace at which certain characters’ secrets were revealed was quite good, keeping the reader guessing while also feeding constant tidbits of information. It’s a well-structured story overall.

The final act is particularly exciting, as everything comes to a head. There’s some decent moments of character growth, though one twist didn’t quite stick the landing for me. The others worked well, though, and I finished the book feeling satisfied.

(Except for one thing regarding the news article at the end, but I can’t explain without it being a spoiler. But in the vaguest of terms, did the surviving characters lie about someone? The math in the article doesn’t check out otherwise, and I would have liked one of them to verbally confirm later what I assume they told the authorities. Hmm… I’m probably not making sense right now to anyone but myself. I need someone I know to read this and make sure I didn’t miss something.)

In the end, though, You Are Fatally Invited was a solid debut novel. It relies a lot on established tropes of its genre, sometimes almost too much, but still manages to tell an intense, compelling story. Some of the scenes can be a little gory, but not gratuitously so for books in this genre. I liked trying to anticipate things, to riddle out who had wronged who, and found the last few chapters on the island to be pretty exciting. It’s not the greatest book in this genre (really, it just made me want to reread And Then There Were None), but it’s still entertaining.

You Are Fatally Invited will be published on February 11th, 2025!