Review: The Weekend Guests - Liza North

 

Review: The Weekend Guests - Liza North - January 2025

There's a particular kind of dread that comes from watching old friends reunite while knowing, as the reader, that not everyone is who they claim to be anymore. Liza North taps straight into that feeling in The Weekend Guests, and honestly, I was hooked from the very first postcard.

Five old university friends - Aline, Sienna, Rob, Michael, and Brandon  haven't all been in a room together for years. Now they're gathering at Aline's stunning clifftop house in Dorset, the kind of setting that practically begs to be photographed for an estate agent's brochure, right up until you remember someone in this group might be capable of murder. There's wine, there's the slightly awkward business of meeting each other's partners for the first time, there's a sitter minding the kids so the grown-ups can relax. It should be idyllic.

It is not idyllic.

Because underneath the reunion warmth sits something these five have kept buried for two decades: a shared crime from their university days, sealed by a pact of silence none of them have broken. Until now. Menacing postcards have started arriving, and Aline is convinced the threat is coming from inside the friend group.

If you grew up loving I Know What You Did Last Summer, you'll feel right at home here except swap out the fisherman's hook for something colder and more calculated, and the "one summer" for "one weekend that's about to unravel twenty years of secrets." Liza North does a lovely job of making the past feel like a fog rolling in rather than a single dramatic reveal; you sense it closing in on the characters page by page before you fully understand what they did.

Where the book really shines is in the discomfort of the present-day scenes. Watching five people perform easy friendship while privately calculating who might crack first is deliciously tense, and Liza North lets the cliffside setting do a lot of atmospheric heavy lifting,  isolated, beautiful, and just remote enough that help is not exactly a phone call away.

It doesn't quite stick every landing in the final act, which is why I've settled on 3Ps rather than four, but as a weekend read it delivers exactly what the tagline promises: five old friends, one reunion, and at least one body bag waiting at the end of it.

Perfect for fans of slow-burn secrets and clifftop tension.

Amazon: https://amzn.to/45kiT7U