You Are Fatally Invited by Ande Pliego (2025 - Release Date 2/11/25)
If nothing else, this book could stake its claim to having one of the most attention getting titles of the year. Who could resist it? With a title like that, you just knew it could only be - #1. Your family's invitation to Thanksgiving dinner where everyone holds different political views. Or #2. A locked room mystery with a host of unusual suspects trapped on a remote storm stricken island.
Surprise surprise ....it's #2. with the added attraction of the host and guests all being best selling mystery authors. And with another big non=surprise......our host, mysterious, anonymous author J.R. Alastor plans to subject his guests to all sorts of puzzling clues and games, based on the secret sins each one is hiding. You would need something akin to a NCAA March Madness chart to make sense of everybody's scandals and exactly how they interconnect with each other. One thing's certain......these people will wish they'd gone on that 3 hour cruise to Gilligan's Island rather than this lethal shindig.
Assisting Alastor in all these murderous revelries is failed writer turned event planner Mila del Angel. But unknown to Alastor, Mila's using this opportunity to wreak overdue vengeance on one of the novelist guests, someone who wronged her terribly, leaving her life and future ambitions in ruins.
The guests themselves arrive with enough emotional baggage and darkest of secrets to fill out a dozen 'trapped-on-a-storm-tossed-island murder mysteries. So it's no great mystery when the 'And-then-there-were-none' body count starts steadily rise to alarming proportions.
In the first chapters, author Ande Pliego uses just enough measures of acerbic wit to poke
some overdue fun at this well worn genre and all its tropes. I only wish the book had maintained that level of sardonic mockery all the way through. But as the bodies pile up and the expected multiple twists finally arrive, the book (and we its readers) become immersed in the impossibly intricate mysteries. on display.
I'm in complete awe of how this labyrinth of a plot works itself out in the final pages. I'd recommend "You Are Fatally Invited" to any mystery fanatics who love to end up muttering multiple times "Well I didn't see THAT one coming.".
4 stars (****). Remember to avoid excursions to remote islands in the midst of stormy weather......not in books, just in real life.....
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