REVIEW:

You know how sometimes you can spend an entire day or longer preparing an elaborate meal (like the Thanksgiving feast for those of us in the States), and then you realize the actual eating of said meal takes under an hour?

Sandie Jones’s latest novel reminded me of that scenario in that it takes 90% of the book to prepare readers for a thrilling event that’s over and done with before you have a chance to savor it. The questions then are 1) if all the lead-up is enjoyable in itself, and 2) if the finished product made it all worth it.

In order to answer yes to the first, you really (and I mean REALLY) need to enjoy the type of backstabbing domestic drama where gossip is king and everyone is possibly/probably banging someone they shouldn’t be. A handful of couples go away together for a destination wedding weekend in Portugal, and as the story moves along you realize friendship and faithfulness are in very low supply.

I personally did find the final pages of the book to be quite compelling, but I’m also glad it wasn’t one page longer. While it wasn’t a total turkey, this melodrama was a bit overstuffed.

My thanks to Minotaur Books and Macmillan Audio for the advance reader and listener copies, respectively. The audiobook has single-person narration performed by the very well cast Clare Corbett. Both formats are available in the US on August 3rd.

PUBLISHER SYNOPSIS:

In the vein of The Other Woman, Sandie Jones’s explosive new novel The Guilt Trip will have readers gripped to the very last page.

Six friends.

Rachel and Noah have been friends since they met at university. While they once thought that they might be something more, now, twenty years later, they are each happily married to other people, Jack and Paige respectively. Jack’s brother Will is getting married, to the dazzling, impulsive Ali, and the group of six travel to Portugal for their destination weekend.

Three couples.

As they arrive at a gorgeous villa perched on a cliff-edge, overlooking towering waves that crash on the famous surfing beaches below at Nazaré, they try to settle into a weekend of fun. While Rachel is looking forward to getting to know her future sister-in-law Ali better, Ali can’t help but rub many of the group up the wrong way: Rachel’s best friend Paige thinks Ali is attention-seeking and childish, and while Jack is trying to support his brother Will’s choice of wife, he is also finding plenty to disagree with Noah about.

One fatal misunderstanding . . .

But when Rachel discovers something about Ali that she can hardly believe, everything changes. As the wedding weekend unfolds, the secrets each of them hold begin to spill, and friendships and marriages threaten to unravel. Soon, jumping to conclusions becomes the difference between life and death.