Sometimes thrillers are just okay and sadly I must add The Dinner Guest to that pile. Though it has two narrators, this book primarily tells the story of Charlie, a rich influencer who is struggling to raise his son, Titus, with his husband, Matthew. Titus is going through his teenage years and his parents aren't sure how to handle it when he reveals he is having sex. Furthermore, Charlie feels Matthew is hiding something from him. The plot kicks off properly when they run into our other narrator Rachel, a woman who has engineered herself into their lives for her own unknown purposes. You learn from the prologue that Rachel will turn herself in for Matthew's murder by the time the book is through, but what led to that situation?
For a book called The Dinner Guest, I expected a little more focus on the dinner party itself. This is a very basic thriller with no real theme, which means the title could have been anything from the plot really. If you're expecting the actual dinner party to be significant beyond somewhere for a character to be murdered, then you will be sadly disappointed.
The characters were well-written for a book of this kind, although I wasn't particularly fond of any of them. Rachel probably ended up being my favourite but Charlie was very insufferable. It felt like him and Matthew viewed Titus as a pet rather than a son, and this was something that was kind of addressed but not really in a way which made me satisfied it was a deliberate decision from the author and not just a result of convenience. Titus neatly comes in and out of the plot as needed and might as well not exist when he's not directly being discussed. He seems the least real out of the characters and the book suffered from it.
As this all seems very negative, now is the time to stress I didn't hate this book. It has a decent plot and I couldn't predict what was going to happen, and it also makes a fair attempt to discuss some wider social issues. There was just nothing that really wowed me or made it stand out among the thriller market. If you need a thriller to pass the time, you could do a lot worse than this. It's just a shame it had nothing new to offer readers.
Overall Rating:
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