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A review by amyvl93
The Dinner Guest by B P Walter
dark
tense
fast-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Plot
- Strong character development? It's complicated
- Loveable characters? No
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
2.5
The Dinner Guest is a murder mystery about all the worst people you could ever meet.
Matthew is murdered, Rachel's confessed to the murder, and Charlie and Titus are shell-shocked. Case closed. Right? Wrong, we have 400 pages of before and after the murder narrative between Rachel and Charlie to tell us what actually happened that evening.
Charlie is overprivileged to the hilt, he runs an instagram influencer account (the novel includes some very detailed descriptions of photo filtering) and is the son of wealthy West London parents, one of whom is a political consultant who is famed for getting wealthy men off criminal charges. Rachel is a wide-eyed girl from Yorkshire, who quit her job as an assistant in a gardening centre to move to London for...mysterious reasons. Titus is the improbably named adopted son of Matthew and Charlie, who I spent most of the novel feeling bad for.
Walton writes a pacey read, but the characters have pretty minimal development and I often felt frustration at the chopping and changing of timelines and perspectives. There's also some odd stuff in here (the way Titus talks about sex and women goes oddly unchallenged, apparently bisexual people don't exist) that got in the way of me really being able to enjoy the novel
Matthew is murdered, Rachel's confessed to the murder, and Charlie and Titus are shell-shocked. Case closed. Right? Wrong, we have 400 pages of before and after the murder narrative between Rachel and Charlie to tell us what actually happened that evening.
Charlie is overprivileged to the hilt, he runs an instagram influencer account (the novel includes some very detailed descriptions of photo filtering) and is the son of wealthy West London parents, one of whom is a political consultant who is famed for getting wealthy men off criminal charges. Rachel is a wide-eyed girl from Yorkshire, who quit her job as an assistant in a gardening centre to move to London for...mysterious reasons. Titus is the improbably named adopted son of Matthew and Charlie, who I spent most of the novel feeling bad for.
Walton writes a pacey read, but the characters have pretty minimal development and I often felt frustration at the chopping and changing of timelines and perspectives. There's also some odd stuff in here (the way Titus talks about sex and women goes oddly unchallenged, apparently bisexual people don't exist) that got in the way of me really being able to enjoy the novel