From the bestselling author of If Something Happens to Me, comes one of the year’s most anticipated thrillers.
PARENTS WEEKEND
by Alex Finlay
Minotaur Books, May 2025
(via The Aaron Priest Literary Agency)
In the glow of their children’s exciting first year of college at a small private school in Northern California, five families plan on a night of dinner and cocktails for the opening festivities of Parents Weekend. As the parents stay out way past their bedtimes, their kids―five residents of Campisi Hall―never show up at dinner.
At first, everyone thinks that they’re just being college students, irresponsibly forgetting about the gathering or skipping out to go to a party. But as the hours click by and another night falls with not so much as a text from the students, panic ensues. Soon, the campus police call in reinforcements. Search parties are formed. Reporters swarm the small enclave. Rumors swirl and questions arise.
Libby, Blane, Mark, Felix, and Stella―The Five, as the podcasters, bloggers, and TikTok sleuths call them―come from five very different families. What led them out on that fateful night? Could it be the sins of their mothers and fathers come to cause them peril or a threat to the friend group from within?
Told through multiple points of view in past and present―and marking the return of FBI Special Agent Sarah Keller from Every Last Fear and The Night Shift―PARENTS WEEKEND explores the weight of expectation, family dysfunction, and those exhilarating first days we all remember in the dorms when our friends become our family.
Alex Finlay is the bestselling author of the 2021 breakout novel, Every Last Fear, the 2022 Goodreads Choice nominee for Best Mystery and Thriller, The Night Shift, the 2023 Library Reads Hall of Fame recipient, What Have We Done, and his latest release, the USA Today bestseller, If Something Happens to Me. Alex’s novels are regularly on “best of the year” lists, have been translated into twenty-five languages, and have been optioned for film or television. Every Last Fear is in development for a major limited series. Alex lives in Washington, DC and Virginia.
For the past five years, Ryan Richardson has relived that terrible night. The car door ripping open. The crushing blow to the head. The hands yanking him from the vehicle. His girlfriend Ali’s piercing scream as she is taken. With no trace of Ali or the car, a cloud of suspicion hangs over Ryan. But with no proof and a good lawyer, he’s never charged, though that doesn’t matter to the podcasters and internet trolls. Now, Ryan has changed his last name, and entered law school. He’s put his past behind him. Until, on a summer trip abroad to Italy with his law-school classmates, Ryan gets a call from his father: Ali’s car has finally been found, submerged in a lake in his hometown. Inside are two dead men and a cryptic note with five words written on the envelope in Ali’s handwriting: If something happens to me… Then, halfway around the world, the unthinkable happens: Ryan sees the man who has haunted his dreams since that night. As Ryan races from the rolling hills of Tuscany, to a rural village in the UK, to the glittering streets of Paris in search of the truth, he has no idea that his salvation may lie with a young sheriff’s deputy in Kansas working her first case, and a mobster in Philadelphia who’s experienced tragedy of his own.
A stay-at-home mom with a past. A has-been rock star with a habit. A reality TV producer with a debt. Three disparate lives. One deadly secret.
It’s New Year’s Eve of 1999 when four teenagers working late are attacked at a Blockbuster video store in New Jersey. Only one survives. Police quickly identify a suspect, the boyfriend of one of the victims, who flees and is never seen again. Fifteen years later, four more teenagers are attacked at an ice cream store in the same town, and again only one makes it out alive. In the aftermath of the latest crime, three lives intersect: the lone survivor of the Blockbuster massacre, who is forced to relive the horrors of her tragedy; the brother of the fugitive accused, who is convinced the police have the wrong suspect; and FBI agent Sarah Keller, who must delve into the secrets of both nights to uncover the truth about the Night Shift Murders…
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