Event planner Aoife and her chef husband Freddy purchased an estate on Cormorant Island, off the coast of Ireland, hoping to make it a wedding destination.
Now pop culture's current 'golden couple', Jules Keegan and Will Slater, are about to get married at the Cormorant Island venue, with no expenses spared.
Beautiful Jules is a digital magazine publisher, and handsome Will is the star of a survivalist television show, and the couple revel in how good they look together. The duo want their wedding to be a huge splash, so they've contracted for the best of everything - food, flowers, decorations, accommodations, etc. The cake alone costs £3,000, and the affair is sure to generate thousands of photos and posts on social media.
To prepare for the festivities, wedding planner Aoife is organizing every aspect of the affair. and her husband Felix is fixing the canapes and preparing the wedding feast. The budding entrepreneurs hope this shindig will bring in lots of subsequent business.
The wedding guests arrive the day before the big event, to get settled in, attend the pre-wedding parties, and enjoy the open bar. The attendees include the bride's parents; the groom's parents; the wedding party; and more than a hundred additional people.
The story is narrated in the rotating voices of several persons, including:
Aoife - the wedding planner;
Charlie - the bride's longtime male friend, who will MC the event;
Hannah - Charlie's wife, who thinks of the trip as a little vacation with her husband, away from the children;
Johnno - the best man, who's known the groom for many years;
and Olivia - the bridesmaid, who's also the bride's half-sister.
The wedding preliminaries get quite boisterous, especially when the ushers - all of whom went to boarding school with the groom - get drunk and raunchy and revert to teenage behavior.
On the day of the nuptials, the wedding ceremony goes smoothly, after which a sudden storm blows into the tents and knocks out the electricity.
When the lights come back on, and the wedding dinner is in full swing, a distraught waitress runs in from outside, babbling about seeing a bloody body. The ushers dash out to see what's happened, but have a hard time searching the drenched island in the dark.
The story alternates back and forth between the present, when the ushers are searching for the bloody body, and the recent and distant past - where we get to know more about Jules, Will, and several other characters. All this leads to the book's climax, which the astute reader may anticipate.....or maybe not.
This is an entertaining mystery, all the more fun for having important clues strewn throughout the narrative.....perfect for the armchair detective.
Highly recommended to fans of 'locked room' mysteries.
Rating: 3.5 stars
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