Parents Weekend by Alex Finlay
Publication Date: May 6, 2025
Summary from NetGalley:
In the glow of their children’s exciting first year of college at a small private school in Northern California, five families plan on a night of 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 at dinner.
At first, everyone thinks that they’re just being college students, irresponsibly forgetting about the gathering or skipping out to go to a party. But as the hours click 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 call them—come from five very different families. What led 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 through multiple points of view in past and present—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 we all remember in the dorms when our friends become our family.
ARC provided by St Martin’s Press via Netgalley for an honest review.
Confession:
At this point I have read almost all of Alex Finlay’s books and have enjoyed them all. I love the fast paced narratives, the complex plots, and how he uses multiple characters who are just as complex as the stories. This book was a really hard one to put down, and even though I knew who was responsible for the kids disappearance almost from the start, I was very much along for the ride.
This story perhaps has the most narrators of any of his previous stories, which made it somewhat difficult to connect to them. It is a pretty short book, so the characters are not as well developed as they could have been. But all of the characters were relatable if unlikable, as you probably know someone very similar. All of the characters, the students and their parents, have secrets, and as those secrets are revealed they result in a lot of misdirections that hinders the police in finding the kids.
There is one character that if you have read some of the author’s other books, you will be familiar with. Special Agent Sarah Keller is the FBI agent who gets involved in the search for the kids. I really like Sarah as she is very smart and diligent and cares about the people she is trying to help, no matter how unlikable they might be. She also has a very stable and loving family with her husband and twins. This stability in her own life was a nice juxtaposition to the turmoil that most of the other families were engaging in.
The story is incredibly fast paced and complex, at least from the investigator’s point of view. It was obvious to the reader who was responsible for the kids disappearance from the start, only because we are privy to the student’s stories as well as the parents. It was easier for us to see the whole picture that way. But knowing who was responsible made the story more suspenseful and unpredictable as you weren’t sure who was going to survive or if the reasons behind the disappearances were justified. It was a well done story with multiple layers that were slowly revealed while keeping a fast paced and suspenseful narrative.
If you are a fan of the author’s other books, especially the ones with Sarah Keller, than this is a must read. Even though it features a character from other books, it is one that could be read as a standalone. If you are a fan of fast paced and suspenseful mystery thrillers than this author and this book should be on your must read list.
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