Omg, what a brilliant thriller. This history absorbed me completely. From the very beginning, the action drew me in incredibly. The plot is straightforward, although the way it was executed delighted me. So this is a story centred on six friends (Padma, Nick, Johnny, Lana, Ness, and Marcus) who spend a week together in an exclusive villa in Sorrento to celebrate Ness's 40th birthday. What I liked the most was that each character has a role in the story and its version of events and perspective. Each of them hides a secret that has been hidden and protected for 18 years of friendship. And in addition, each of these personal stories wonderfully complements the whole, covering more and more new details. Reading this book, I felt almost like a detective who interrogates witnesses and builds a reconstruction of events from their testimonies/memories. It was a really great read.

3/5 stars! This was an interesting premise for a thriller and the payoff was decent. My issue was that I didn't really feel for any of the characters, which made it hard to care about the ending. The pacing was good but the friends lacked depth. An average thriller for an easy Summer read.

I received a free copy of this book via NetGalley and am voluntarily leaving a review

This book tells the story of a group of friends reconnecting to celebrate a 40th birthday. The friendgroup is full of secrets and lies that the characters feel if they get out will ruin their lives. This book had an intriguing premise, but I feel it wasn't executed well. The characters fell a little flat to me. I struggled to keep up between all of the alternating points of view and the story shifting between the past and present. I felt the pacing of the novel was a little slow and could have moved a little faster to the big conclusion scenes in the end.

The Final Party by A. A. Chaudhuri ⭐⭐⭐.5

The Final Party by A. A. Chaudhuri is an engrossing thriller set in 2019 in the beautiful town - Sorrento, Italy. The story explores the lives of a group of closest friends: Nick, Padma, Venessa, Marcus, Lana and Johnny entangled with countless threads of lies owing to an eighteen year old incident.

Venessa and Marcus invite the other two couples to the glamorous villa of Sorrento to celebrate Venessa’s 40th birthday in style. However, the exciting reunion soon turns into a nightmare when one of them starts receiving threatening messages regarding that past event.

Storyline is full of twists and turns and countless revelations. Some of it is expected and predictable while some of it comes as a hard hit. There is an air of mystery throughout where you keep guessing and second-guessing. Two timelines progress simultaneously dealing with the current events of 2019 and past events of 2001. The narration keeps shifting from one friend to another as the story progresses and we delve deep into the past and present of all the characters.

The character development is done nicely and they are established properly. The shadiness is prominent amongst most characters and all I would like to say is they carry a lot of dark secrets with them.

The storyline seems intriguing from the beginning but elongated and iterative writing makes you bore out for the first half. Second half is much more engaging and pacier. Writing style is easy but the author could have cut short a lot of repetitiveness from the story.

I did expect better and more thrilling writing, but overall the concept/story saves the book. recommend it for the story. The book releases on 25th May 2023 but you can pre-order it right now.

Thank you to A.A. Chaudhuri, Hera Books and NetGalley for allowing me to read an advanced copy, which I have reviewed honestly and voluntarily.

This book was so fun and twisty. I loved it. There was so much drama it definitely kept me on the edge of my seat and wanting to know what would happen next. This book releases May 25, and I highly suggest adding it to your TBR.

Thank you to NetGalley for the ARC.

I really enjoyed this book. I found it a bit hard to get into at first, but once I did, I enjoyed the setting and the development of the characters. I absolutely was not expecting the ending and it surprised me. I definitely recommend this book.

Three couples travel to a luxury villa in Sorento, Italy to celebrate one of the women's 40th birthday. They are long-time "friends", although there is so much jealousy and thinly-veiled animosity here that it's hard to understand why they'd want to spend time together. There are secrets and a long-buried incident from the past that casts a long shadow over the present. Someone has an ulterior motive and before the week is out someone will be murdered. We get the POV of each of the six characters and they are all pretty loathsome. I kept reading to find out who was being targeted and what had happened in the past. This was suspenseful and I didn't see the twist coming.

I received an ARC copy of the Final Party by A.A. Chaudhuri from Netgalley.

I felt like the book started out with a whole lot of promise.. someone is dead... but who could it be?! A group of old college friends comes together to celebrate one of their 40th birthdays in Sorrento, Italy. There are many questions to be answered about the tension that it felt among this crowd of people. There seem to be secrets of their past that they are hiding from one another (as well as secrets in the present). However, the book is so descriptive of the characters and got a bit repetitive of their descriptions that the actual story kind of gets lost.
I kind of felt like I was reading and reading and reading so much information, but never really getting important pieces of information about the actual storyline until about 85-90% into the book. There were also I think six different perspectives told throughout the book but in the past and present, and not told in chronological order, so you kept having to remind yourself okay so this is when this happened. And the storyline with the characters were very similar, so I often had to go back to the beginning of the chapter just to see whose perspective it actually was. It was a bit frustrating to be reading so much information and not get any hint or clue about what their big secret was from the past. It was very repetitive and no real twists occurred until 85-90% into the book and then everything was revealed at once.
The premise of the book was good, but again, it was very hard to keep focus throughout when there is so much detail without really getting any information about the big secret they are all hiding.

Unable to give feedback due to the fact that there was no archive date at first, and suddenly there was a date, but too quickly.

Three couples in an Italian villa and one person turns up dead. Another person receives messages alluding to a bad historical situation. Sounds like a fun read.
I must say that while the idea is clever, the execution is not as engaging or well-written as I wanted it to be.

The story idea is good but the execution of it didn't work for me. The writing was dull and there wss not a decent/likable character in the bunch. Thanks to Netgalley for the opportunity to read this book

Thank you #Netgalley for the advanced copy!

In this read we follow six friends, each with a secret and history they want to keep hidden from some key people. When one of the friends, Ness, invites the group together for a trip to Italy for her 40th birthday, the group is caught off guard as they don't typically all interact as much as they used to previously. Little did we know that Ness had other reasons as to why she wanted to pull the group together, to clear her conscious. Meanwhile, others in the group begin received anonymous text messaged that shakes them to their core. The plot jumps back and forth from each persons perspective in current times then back to when their secrets occurred during college. I was shocked with the ending and the many connections that been revealed.

Multi layered storytelling with many povs and dual timelines. I enjoyed this book overall but found the final reveal a little disappointing. Thank You NetGalley and Herra books for an Arc of this

Overall, this book has twists and turns coming out of every end! I found myself captivated with the various narrators and their connections to one another. I will say that I often do not like various narrators AND various time/setting changes as it can sometimes become too much to follow but felt that this was not the case! I overall enjoyed the book with the only real critique being that the final “shock and awe” felt kinda stretched.

This is my second read from A.A. Chaudhuri and while I really enjoyed the first book I had a hard time with "The Final Party". I need to care about the characters in a book, either because I really like them or I really don't; unfortunately I found all the characters in this book irritating to the point that I did not care what happened to them. A lot of repetition made it longer than it needed to be which made reading frustrating.

Thank you to the publisher and NetGalley for the opportunity to read this book in advance of publication.

Gripping summer read.

A group of friends from college travel to Italy for a holiday. More than one person is hiding a big secret that could blow all their lives apart.

The beginning of this book infuriated me to the point I was going to abandon it. There was one too many POV and they all seemed to be telling the same story and giving the same descriptions of each other and it was too repetitive. I'm glad I stuck with it because just under the halway point it took a turn for the better and really picked up the pace. I ended up really enjoying it. The characters were mostly unlikeable but they needed to be for the story. Think your typical rich arrogant characters and the typical do anything to fit in kids and you can picture them quite clearly in your mind as you read along. There were a few reveals throughout which were done really well, as a reader I love a nice twist in the tale. I do think it would have benefitted from an extra one or two chapters to completely round off the story but overall it is a very good holiday read.

Thank you to NetGalley for my digital copy of this book.

Padma and Nick, Johnny and Lana and Vanessa and Marcus: 6 friends - 3 couples - gather in Sorrento, Italy to celebrate a milestone birthday, but their complex friendship is based on lies and secrets that are about to be revealed with one of them dying.
Back in 2001, Padma, Johnny, Nick and Vanessa were at Oxford together; Padma dating Johnny, Nick and Vanessa flat sharing, with both being close friends of Johnny. Lana is Padma's best friend from school and when a student goes missing and Padma is attacked one night, losing a week of her life, a set of events follow that change the course of all their lives.
This thriller is, in some places, predictable. Told from alternate points of view, and going back and forth between 2001 and 2019 (present day in the novel) we discover that all the characters are hiding something and they are linked to each other in ways that even they don't fully realise. There were a couple of twists I didn't see coming, always a good thing and making this a decent read, but overall, I just found some of the characters irritating more than anything else.

A.A. Chaudhuri is a new favourite author of mine and I was really looking forward to reading The Final Party especially when I realised it was set around Sorrento and Capri-two of my favourite places in the entire world! And I wasn’t disappointed as the author transported me through her beautifully written novel back to the Amalfi coast. The plot is perfectly pitched as a story of friendship and betrayal with a cast of (often unlikeable) characters and multiple points of view plus a dual timeline-everything I love in a psychological thriller!
A perfect holiday buy for fans of dark, twisty and gripping reads.

"The Final Party" by A.A. Chaudhuri takes 6 friends to a luxury villa in Italy to celebrate one of their 40th birthdays. Tensions and jealousy run high, and their perfect reunion quickly becomes a holiday from hell. By the end, one of them is dead and their history of dark secrets is exposed.

Before reading this book, I was so excited by the premise. However, the POVs (six in total) were so similar that I quickly lost interest. I had to drag myself through the first three quarters of the book because I felt like each chapter was a repeat of the last.

My least favourite thing in mystery books is when the characters keep alluding to their "big secret" but don't reveal anything until the very end. This book has this in abundance.  As a reader, you need small revelations (tiny, even) to keep you interested.

The last quarter of the book slightly redeemed itself by picking up with a couple twists, but it was very anticlimactic.

A big thank you to Net Galley and the publisher for this ARC!

I was given this book by NetGalley for an honest review-
It’s Ness 40 birthday party planned by her husband and what a party it will be! He invites three couples to a beautiful location - each carrying baggage from college years and a party that went wrong—- something that should never happen. Makes you wonder if you really know your friends. Ness wants everyone to come clean but what will happen if they do? And what is the true story? And- will it lead to murder? A great psychological read!!