The New Year’s Party, Jenna Satterthwaite (Review by Rachel Taran)

Rating: 4.5/5 Stars

This is NOT a spoiler: Right from the very beginning of The New Year’s Party, we have an intriguing premise. There’s a group of friends celebrating New Year’s Eve and someone is found dead. The very next chapter goes back to the beginning of the morning of New Year’s Eve and as the book progresses, we start to learn about this group of high school friends, their spouses, partners, and ex-partners. More of each individual backstory begins to emerge. We learn about cheating, rehab stints, jail time, divorce, sexual assault, and the many fractures in all the different relationships.

As the story continues to unfold throughout the night of the New Year’s party, many past secrets and stories are revealed. As we learn bits and pieces about everyone, it becomes clear that they all carry anger towards someone else in the group, and they each mention at some point in their own narrative how much they want to kill that person. These reveals were such a smart way to keep us guessing as to who the victim from the beginning actually is and who killed them.

I usually love stories like this but my biggest challenge with this book was keeping the characters and their stories straight, as each chapter bounced around to someone else’s perspective and often bounced around between the past and the present. However, I loved the author’s technique of slowly dropping crumbs of each smaller story. At the time, some of the crumbs were still a little confusing as they were often missing a bigger context that we as the reader didn’t know yet. By the end though, the payoff was that all the crumbs came together to explain what happened, who was dead, and who had done it. In the last few chapters, there were actually a few mini twists and they all caught me off guard in the best way!

Overall, this book was great. If you don’t mind multiple perspective storytelling and are a fan of thriller/murder stories, you will love this book!