Book Review: The Wedding Party by L. R. Jones

Reality doesn’t dovetail with what’d you’d expect from an almost-married couple. Meet the bride and groom: Carrie Reynolds is a nurse at Denver’s Memorial Hospital and Oliver Phoenix is a wealthy entrepreneur. They’re clearly under some strain. Oliver blows off Carrie when she asks to see a wedding gift that he’s just opened. He says, “Not a chance. I’m not letting you see this.” Oliver claims it’s a gag gift from one of his groomsmen and picks up the box. Their intense conversation ends abruptly. 

He doesn’t wait for a reply. He walks to his right and into his office, and to my shock, he shuts the door. He never shuts the door. The card for the gift is lying on the hall table, and I pick it up and glance at the front of the envelope. It reads “Oliver Phoenix,” not “Oliver and Carrie.” That gift was for Oliver, and the writing is distinctively female.

Secrets and lies. Not a great prelude to a wedding. The next morning Oliver is gone before Carrie wakes up. At lunch, Carrie unloads on her girlfriend Lana. The conversation heats up when Lana posits that Carrie’s combo bachelor/bachelorette/Halloween party at the Stanley Hotel in two weeks’ time, will most likely deteriorate into the guys slinking off to looking at naked breasts … Carrie’s not having it.

Andrea “Andi” Castle is having “drinks with a friend, with not a murder in sight.” Andi is an FBI agent—her drinking companion is Lana, “an old friend from college.” Small world! Lana tells her friend she looks beautiful, not bad for a “badass profiler.” Reeling from her recent divorce and burnt out from six months as an ER nurse, Lana relishes the girls’ night out and wants to keep the party going. Lana begs Andi to be her plus-one at a “party in Estes Park next weekend—it’s this combo bachelor/bachelorette party.” No way, but Lana persists.

“It’s at that hotel where Stephen King wrote The Shining. It’s supposed to be haunted, which is kind of cool.”

 

“The last thing I need is some killer I put away coming back to haunt me at some spooky hotel. No thank you.”

 

“Screw the ghosts. We’ll eat, drink, and shop. It’ll be fun.”

 

“The bride doesn’t know me.”

 

“The bride is supersweet and easygoing.”

Although Lana promises to keep on asking, it turns out she doesn’t have to. Andi goes to the bathroom and while she’s washing her hands, a reporter pumps her on Spider Man (the media’s name for a high-profile case Andi just solved). The reporter’s follow-up question is about Eddie Castle, Andi’s famous Teflon-tough PI father who was “kicked off the force for use of force.” After her unpleasant encounter with the nosy reporter, Andi tells Lana, “I will go. I’m off for two more weeks. Maybe if they can’t find me, the press will move the heck on, and I can go back to work in peace.” Let the partying commence.

That said, as Andi piles into Lana’s BMW for a “murder-free weekend,” guess what’s on her mind? Foreshadowing alert: murder!

The Stanley Hotel is everything: Lana has even signed up for a haunted room. Andi is having none of that: “I need a room that has never seen a ghost. Ever. And I mean never.” Andi meets the bride-to-be, Carrie, who is “starstruck” to meet an honest-to-goodness FBI agent. Andi sluffs that off: “I’m about as exciting as a Golden Girls rerun and a peanut butter sandwich, minus the jelly.” Carrie’s not buying it: she insists that Andi stay in #217, Stephen King’s room. 

Andi is OK with the atmosphere—there are “lots of hospital jokes floating around,” naturally, but then the groom’s sister, Natalie Phoenix, singles her out for some pointed questions. Andi tries to bat them away, saying that as a profiler, it’s “basically a bunch of tedious paperwork.” But Natalie persists: “What type of criminals do you profile?” Andi tries to shut down the interchange, but Natalie is on a roll: “I’m a little shocked you came to the party, Andi, or really, I should say, Agent Castle. You don’t even know the bride.” Cut to Carrie’s jumbo margarita sloshing over Andi’s blouse and she’s out of there. Back in her room, her trained mind goes over what happened: “I think Carrie knocked that drink over on purpose, but with what endgame? To get rid of me or shut up Natalie?” The evening winds on—tours with an emphasis on haunted, increasingly lit conversations with this groomsman and that friend—but at last she’s back in her room and tries to rest.

I drift into a heavy slumber that ends when pounding on my door jolts me into a sitting position. “Andi! Andi!” At Lana’s frantic voice, I throw away the covers and race toward the door, expecting a tipsy, heartbroken friend.

 

Caution be damned, I throw open the door to find her tear-streaked face. “We need you,” she sobs. “Oliver’s dead and Carrie is missing.”

It’s astonishing how quickly Andi switches gears from exhausted partier to FBI agent. She grabs a small purse filled with crime scene supplies—yes, it was in her vacation suitcase. When the local police arrive and learn that she’s an FBI agent, they ask for her help. It’s not as if Andi can leave: the hotel is on lockdown. Given her seniority and expertise, she ends up leading the investigation. 

If you like mysteries where you really don’t know whodunnit, The Wedding Party will be right up your alley. It’s witty, surprising, and full of surprises. I hope there’s another story with Andrea “Andi” Castle at the helm.