Parents Weekend
Parents Weekend
By: Alex Finlay
[On my list of Most Anticipated Books of 2025]
“‘Thoughts swirling, they wonder what clues the police will find. The group chat? The social-media posts? The video of the horror that brought them here?”
This is my third Alex Finlay book. I’ve read The Night Shift and What Have We Done?.
I have learned that Alex Finlay’s writing style involves a lot of unlikable characters. Sarah Keller— the FBI agent that is in this book and The Night Shift— and her husband are likeable, but in all the books I’m not sure I liked anyone else.
Out of all three books I think I liked What Have We Done? the best.
Parents Weekend is not a spectacular book because I saw the ending a mile away but it’s still a decent enough read. Just like the other two, it reads very quickly so your time commitment to the book is low.
I actually hesitated to request this book from NetGalley because I tend to be a pessimistic reader of story lines that involve youths and partying as a main plot point. But I remembered liking What Have We Done? so I thought I would give it a chance.
And my original instinct was somewhat accurate: I’m just not that interested in thrillers that revolve around youths doing stupid things while drunk or on drugs which are in and of themselves stupid things. I don’t even have a ‘that’s just kids being kids in college I can relate to that’ kind of perspective because that was nowhere close to my desired or actual college experience.
This book takes place over parents weekend at Santa Clara University in California. We are first introduced via multiple POVs the different parental units of a group of friends:
The Roosevelts (Blane): parents divorced, mother (Cynthia) is high up in the State Department; Blane was abducted as a kid
The Maldonados (Stella): dad (David) is a plastic surgeon who recently cheated on mom (Nina) who is a yoga teacher and things went bad
The Goffmans (Felix): mom divorced abusive dad a long time ago and now works for the dean at the school
The Akanas (Libby): dad (Ken) is a judge that just presided over a well known case regarding a rock star and ruled against him, mom (Amy) is a lawyer turned stay at home mom who quit working to take care of their son who has since died from cancer
Mark Wong: estranged dad did jail time for sexual assault of minors
An arranged dinner for these families is the first sign of trouble. None of the kids show up and they aren’t answering any texts or phone calls.
Because two of the families are high profile, FBI agent Keller is called in to work with campus police to determine what happened to the students.
Of course all the families have to have some sort of abuse, infidelity, or problem to create additional avenues of investigation on who would have targeted these kids. Unless it’s all some sort of ruse, prank, or just irresponsible decision making that is classic of young freshmen college students.
The longer they go without news of the students the less likely they are to find them alive.
Random Comments:
I thought there was going to be something more substantial come from the encounter between Cynthia and Mitch.
Alice read a book about how to be a better communicator and if you want to read it too, it’s most likely Supercommunicators.
The quote I put at the beginning of this review talks about a group chat, and I’m not sure that was ever discussed…
They mention a cliffside in Australia that is known as a location for a lot of suicides and that reminded me of Sally Hepworth’s thriller The Soulmate that revolves around a cliff in Australia with suicides but it’s called The Drop instead of The Gap.
Recommendation
This was never going to be my favorite book, but it’s still a pretty standard, decent thriller.
I probably just need to trust my instincts on college-related stories and save those for others that are more interested in that. I can still see myself reading another Alex Finlay book if the premise is compelling.
I would recommend Parents Weekend for people who enjoy thrillers and don’t care if they like the characters or not.
If you prefer hard to figure out thrillers or ones with a lot of likable characters, this might not be the book for you.
[Content Advisory: 20 f-words, 35 s-words]
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