No One Was Supposed to Die at This Wedding (2025)
A Hollywood murder mystery that’s a bit too self-aware.
This is a fun murder mystery set amidst a wedding of Hollywood A-listers on a private island. I enjoyed the mystery plot, but I found the narrator and meta commentary distracting.
This book is the second in a series, but struggles to escape the gravity of the first book. It doesn’t rely on your knowledge of the first book, but it’s clear throughout that I’m missing things because I haven’t read it, which is a dangerous trap for a sequel. The first book should either be standalone or required, not in this weird middle ground.
The narrator is the fictional crime author Eleanor Dash, whose meta commentary on murder mysteries became grating. She knows that she’s in a murder mystery story, she knows how they go, and she can’t resist explaining it to us. This may contribute to the convoluted ending, in which three of our main characters get arrested. (And unlike other stories, I didn’t fully understand the scope of each of their involvement.)
Other reviews praise these books for their use of footnotes. They do add a touch of whimsy, but I found them infuriating. In my copy, random words are underlined but they don’t seem to have any meaning or broader purpose. I got the impression they were a clue that would be explained later, but no dice. (I suspect this technique is explained in the prequel, which adds to my sense it was a mistake to read this book first.)
I can see why this book would appeal to people, and I might have had a different opinion if I’d not jumped in with book 2 – but I’m not going to seek out other stories by this author myself.
Quotes and highlights
Page 288, when Eleanor discovers a body in the bathroom that she believes is the bride’s husband:
The smell of blood is mingling with a whiff of bleach that hangs in the air. There’s a bucket and a mop next to me, and part of me wants to clean this mess up and hide the body and go back to the party like nothing happened because that way I won’t have to tell Emma she’s a widow before she ever had a chance to be a wife.