As a huge fan of thrillers, this book’s summary immediately captured my attention. Just like the quick blurb did, the entire novel kept me on the edge of my seat, wanting to uncover the mystery that befell new mom Orla on her girls’ weekend away.
The book starts off with what seems like it will be a light-hearted trip between two old friends but ends with a twist! Orla and her old friend, Kate, a wild child with an edge, have planned a weekend away after Kate’s recent separation. However, the plan goes astray and Kate goes missing. Orla seeks assistance from the police, who are less than useless, and gets the attention of her Uber driver, Konstantin, who tries to help her find her friend.
This book includes it all- a love triangle, mystery, friendship, and even a brief snippet into the world of the mafia. There truly is something for everyone.
The writing style was clear and I enjoyed seeing the events unfold. The ending was anything but predictable and kept me riveted until the last moment.

Orla and Kate have been best friends forever. Although it;s been several years since their last annual getaway, they embark on a trip to Lisbon. New mom, Orla, is hesitant to go, but Kate, who is in the middle of divorcing her husband, helps convince Orla that they both need the weekend away.

The weekend begins with dinner, followed by drinks at a bar, where Orla and Kate meet two incredibly handsome men. Kate invites them back to the apartment, despite Orla's protests. Then, we cut to the next morning, when Orla wakes up with only fragments of memories from the night before. As she begins to try to piece together the events of the evening, she realizes Kate isn't there to help with what she remembers. We then follow Orla as she tries to retrace their steps from the night before, hoping to find clues as to where Kate may be. Orla fears the worst and is racing to find Kate and anyone who may know anything about her whereabouts.

This was such an interesting read. The characters were well-developed and there were many suspicious characters -- it truly kept me guessing until the end as to who knew what / what the events of that night truly were. In the beginning, Orla is a bit annoying -- the story is told from her perspective, so we have a lot of insight into her overactive imagination.... or could it be possible? As the story unfolds and Orla starts uncovering pieces of the night, she becomes much more dynamic and interesting.

There are so many mysterious aspects of this book -- Orla learns much more about Kate and the people in their lives than she had bargained for. The second half of the book was really a page-turner, as Orla began making headway into uncovering what happened that night. Even int he final chapters, I was guessing / second guessing who I suspected had a hand in the occurrences that night and could not put the book down before finding out! This did have an open-ending, but also did give some closure -- it's certainly one I'll be thinking about for awhile!

Orla is a new mom who is married and trying to get back in the groove.
Kate is going through a divorce and looking for a fun getaway.
Orla and Kate have been friends for decades. They used to take a weekend a year to get away and have some fun. But Orla's trip to motherhood put the breaks on that for some time. Now they have planned to go away for the weekend and reconnect and have some fun, just like the old days. However this trip is not like any others. Kate goes missing after a night out and Orla is trying to find her. There are so many twists and turns, that you are kept guessing to the last line of the book.
What a great read - I look forward to reading more books by this author.

Wow I really enjoyed this book. Finished it in one four hour sitting! I enjoyed that it was a fast paced book and got right into the story within the first few chapters.

Really good book! I did not like the ending, though. I need further information, I hate finishing a book, and having so many questions!

Wow Wow Wow!!!! I absolutely loved this book. The author kept me guessing who did it the whole time. I feel like the author left the door open for a part 2. I will definitely follow Sarah Alderson. You will not regret reading The Weekend Away by Sarah Alderson. #TheWeekendAway #NetGalley Thank you #netgalley for the opportunity to read an advice copy.

Looking for a whodunit thriller? Then this book is for you. The author takes you on what feels like a journey through a maze, leading you in all sorts of wrong directions and dead ends before finally getting to the center. Best friends, Orla and Kate, head to Lisbon for a girls weekend away, but only one comes back alive.

Orla is struggling as a new mother and Kate is in the midst of a messy divorce. This weekend away is what they both need. To kick the weekend off, they head into town to have dinner and drinks. When Orla wakes up the next day, she has minimal recollection of the night before and feels as if she’s been drugged. And to make it even worse, Kate is gone.

Orla feels as if she is Kate’s last hope, and goes on a wild goose chase trying to retrace their steps the night before. Between the language barrier and the police not fully believing that Kate is missing, Orla has her hands full.

Thank you so much to Avon, Harper 360 and NetGalley for providing me a digital ARC of The Weekend Away in exchange for an honest review.

Wow! This thriller exceeded my expectations with a few well-placed twists!

Orla and Kate are best friends, but only one of them has outgrown their wild twenties. While new mom Orla would love to have a relaxing weekend in Portugal, Kate wants to hit the town. After a night of drinking, drugs, and men, Kate is nowhere to be found. Kate's secrets come to light as Orla searches for her missing friend and begins to question how well she knew her...

I've read a lot of "girl gone missing" thrillers, but Alderson brings something fresh here. The mysterious cast of characters and the beautiful Portuguese setting had me hooked. Great ending too - one of the best I've read recently.

Thank you to Harper 360/Avon for providing an ARC on NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

Amazing thriller. Not super predictable and super twisty. I couldn’t wait to know the end so I just kept reading until I was done and it did not disappoint.

I was blown away with the number of twists and turns with The Weekend Away - gripping, thrilling, and suspenseful wrapped up into 400 pages that you won't want to put down.

*spoilers*
Orla and Kate, two friends, decide it's time for a lavish weekend away. Orla is a first-time mother ready for a getaway and Kate is going through a divorce. They take a Holiday to Lisbon and only one of them will come home. After a big first night out. The two go back to their Airbnb with two gentlemen that Kate decides to bring back to the apartment. Orla isn't having it and goes to sleep, while Kate entertains the gents. When Orla wakes up, Kate is gone. Orla is trying to put together details of the evening and decides it's best to go to the police and start to retrace the night before starting with their Uber driver...Orla makes a series of shattering discoveries that threaten everything she holds dear. Lisbon holds the secret of what happened that night, the truth may lie closer to home.

The Weekend Away had a ton of twists and turns, and I couldn't stop reading. Often with thrillers, I figure out quickly who "did it," but every time I thought I had Kate's disappearance figured out I was wrong. I finished the book in a day, and I appreciate the surprise ending; however, I do wish there was an epilogue. What happened to Marlow, do Orla and Konstandin keep in touch?

As a Crime Junkie rule - you never really know someone and in this story, that sentiment couldn't be more true. Orla is constantly asking herself - how well do I know my best friend, Kate, Husband, Rob, the Uber drive from last night, my landlord, etc. The facts she uncovers will send you on a wild goose chase to get answers to what happened to her friend.

Trigger Warnings: drowning, cheating, abuse

Read if you like:
Suspense
A Nacy Drew-like novel
A victorious female lead
Twists and turns
An outcome you wouldn't anticipate
Drama

Thanks to NetGalley for providing me with a digital ARC in exchange for my honest review.

This mystery/thriller is full of many twists and turns.

Best friends Orla and Kate plan a much needed girls weekend away in Lisbon. They arrive ready to relax and have some fun but things quickly spiral out of their control.

When Kate goes missing Orla does some detective work of her own to find her. She enlists the help of an Uber driver who has his own checkered past that he uses to help get answers.

What they find is not what you may expect -- take a day, sit down and read this book to see what I mean.

Thank you NetGalley for an ARC for my honest opinion.

This was a fast-paced read.
I was a little disappointed to find out that the cover was a little deceiving!

sometimes I felt as the characters just didn't do it for me. I enjoyed the storyline, and the potential this book had..... But it just lacked in some areas.

Overall..... Good book

🔆🔆🔆🐾 REVIEW 🐾🔆🔆🔆

Pub date: 4/13/2021
Thank you @netgalley and Avon Publishing for this awesome read in exchange for my honest review! 🌸

Abby is modeling The Weekend Away by Sarah Alderson today. 🐶 We loved this fast paced #mystery/thriller and could not put this book down. I was literally reading this every second I had a free moment whether it was a 📖 page or paragraph. I needed to know the ending.
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Friends, Orla and Kate, go on a girls’ getaway in Lisbon as they always did when they were younger. 💃🏻 Now that Orla is married to Rob with a sweet baby girl, she has neglected her best friend and missed out on their yearly girls’ trips the past few years. 🍼 But Kate is going through a divorce and Orla has to be there for her.
🐾
The relaxing weekend, however, does not go as planned. Kate goes missing and Orla is desperate to find her. She won’t leave the country until she knows 🕵️‍♀️ what happened to her best friend and goes on a wild goose chase to piece together this puzzle.
🐾
Secret after secret is uncovered leaving the reading guessing and then questioning those guesses as to what happened to Kate. 🧐We have an answer at the end, but of course there is one last twist you won’t want to miss.
🐾
This is a must read. We enjoyed it so much and will definitely read more books by this author. 💫

Abby rates The Weekend Away 🌟 🌟 🌟 🌟.5/5 stars!

Review can be found on instagram @barkfurbooks and on goodreads www.goodreads.com/barkfurbooks.

Wow! Full of curve-balls and zigzags! If you’re in the market for a good thriller, look no further and don’t be reluctant to invest in this one. The Weekend Away will have you searching for answers right alongside Orla and up to the very last page. Just when you think you’ve figured out what happened that night . . . here comes another tip to send you off in a different direction.

I whole-heartedly enjoyed Ms. Alderson's work. From all aspects, it is a top notch example of the “stay up all night” thriller. Not to short change any aspect, but I would be remiss if I didn’t say how very impressed I was with the character profiles. Even the subordinate characters were wonderfully detailed and easy to picture in your mind’s eye..

As the setting, Lisbon is a darkly chilling backdrop for the events to unfurl themselves against. Throw in a whisper of the mafia paired with institutional corruption and you have enough to keep me reading. I’m sure others will too.

Thank you, #TheWeekendAway #NetGalley for the ARC.

All new moms (or mums) dream of going on holiday and getting to sleep in, right!? Orla is lucky to be going on a weekend getaway with her best friend Kate. But what should be a weekend full of laughs, pampering, and relaxation quickly turns into a fast-paced mystery and crime thriller. A great read!

Gah! SO many twists!!! Love love love when the book gives such good descriptions you only want to keep turning the pages to find out what is going to happen next. The ending was excellent. Perfect popcorn/beach read. Thanks netgalley the publisher and author for my copy in exchange for an honest review.

VERY well-written twisty mystery! Two girlfriends go to Lisbon for a “weekend away” from their troubles and there is a LOT of trouble on their so-called “vacation” that snowballs into a huge, tangled mess. Several théories as to exactly what happened, and a little sleaze if you like that sort of thing. The creep factor is ramped UP in this book with many strange and creepy characters. I wasn’t impressed with Orla, she doesn’t appear too bright, and way too trusting for someone middle aged. The characters were fleshed out, excellent descriptions and details, and a surprise ending. This was a great read, and was hard to put down. In between readings I thought of the book, but needed more to sleep. Highly recommend if you like sleuthing and mysteries. Thank you to Netgalley and Avon Books UK for an ARC in exchange for my honest opinion.

8/10 stars

SPOILER-FREE REVIEW: The Weekend Away is a mystery/thriller novel that was written by Sarah Alderson and released by Avon/Harper 360 books. (The Kindle edition is available right now; the paperback, at least in the US, shows a release for April 2021 but may be out sooner.) Alderson is the author of such novels as The Sound and Hunting Lila, and has also written contemporary modern fiction as Mila Gray. The tagline for this novel reads, “Two friends go on holiday. Only one comes back.”

PLOT RUNDOWN/BASICS: Orla is about to go on her first weekend away with her oldest friend, Kate, after giving birth to her daughter nine months before. It’s the first time she’s leaving baby Marlow alone with her husband, Rob, and while she’s anxious about being so far away from her family, she’s excited to have a weekend away with her best friend of more than 20 years.

Once upon a time, Orla and Kate had vowed to save one weekend a year to travel to some exotic foreign location together - the type of promise made by young, naive friends, Orla assumes. This was before she and Rob spent years trying to conceive via IVF and failing, until miracle Marlow came along...and before Kate married a man she’s now desperately trying to divorce and forget, in spectacular fashion. It’s been years since they took one of their trips, but now they’re in gorgeous Lisbon, in an apartment - with a view and a hot tub - that seems too good to be true. What could go wrong?

To Orla’s shock and dismay, their first night together includes a late-night dinner, drugs, a trip to a bar, and - to her utter horror - Kate insisting they bring two gorgeous single men back home with them. Suddenly drunker than she’s ever been - despite having only had a little to drink - Kate has no defenses, and the men escort them back to the apartment. The next thing Orla knows, it’s mid-afternoon the next day...and Kate has disappeared.

The only thing worse than having a friend go missing is having it happen in a foreign country on a weekend trip...and having to try to convince the authorities to take Kate’s disappearance seriously. Orla is overwhelmed with confusion, and doubt, and a black hole where her memories of Friday night should be. Who can she trust in this strange place? And who is lying to her? As she spirals further into the mystery and her own rogue investigation, trying to figure out what happened to Kate, she leads herself further and further into danger - and, possibly, directly into the trap of a potential murderer.

MY THOUGHTS: This was my first novel by Alderson, and I thoroughly enjoyed it. I would categorize this as a guilty-pleasure read, and a fast-paced one at that. It’s not a genre-bending or envelope-pushing type of story; you won’t find a social message or soliloquy on injustice in this novel. This is for fans of twisty and juicy mystery stories like those told by BJ Paris, or Shari Lapena, or maybe Ruth Ware (God help us) - but well-written.

There’s always something extra dark and creepy about the thought of a loved one disappearing while you’re vacationing in a foreign country. Things and places are unfamiliar, systems are structured differently, and having authorities take the disappearance of a tourist seriously seems like an uphill battle no one would ever want to take on. If anyone reading this is from the Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark generation, like myself, you might remember a particularly haunting story about a mother and daughter vacationing in a foreign land, and she woke up one morning to find her mother completely gone - vanished without a trace. When she asked the hotel employees about her mother, they told her no one else had checked in with her...and when everyone who’d seen them together refused to admit that her mother had ever been there, she began to question her own sanity.

In the same way, Orla begins to doubt Kate’s motives, and her own faulty memory on what happened that fateful evening...and the farther along she gets with her investigation, the more it looks like she should have been questioning her friend all along. But who can she trust in Lisbon (and back home, for that matter), and is it possible someone might be working alongside her just to cause her harm in the end?

I admit that the ending is one I vaguely saw coming in the first few chapters, only because the overall motive is very reminiscent to one used in a book I refused to finish a year ago by a popular mystery author I’m not a big fan of (not Ware, you’ll be thrilled to know). However, that did not deter me from continuing with this book at all, because the twists and turns the story took were very entertaining and did not solidify what I’d guessed until the very last couple of pages. I found this storyline refreshing and different from many of the cookie-cutter thrillers out there now; having it take place in a foreign city, with only strangers to aid Orla, and with very few clues, made it a definite page-turner.

This is absolutely a thriller I’d recommend to any fan of the genre, especially if you’re tired of the typical plotline and are looking for more international intrigue. And I’m happy to say that while I skimmed the book again page-by-page for a detailed plot review, I was intrigued and amused to see many hints that I’d never have picked up on without knowing the ending - which is not something I think I’ve ever said about a mystery story before. (Usually I see every single red herring and “hidden-but-obvious” clue with a 97% precision rate. Just guessing.)

The Weekend Away by Sarah Alderson was okay. I wanted to sink into a thrilling mystery from the synopsis, but I felt the book felt a bit short of that. The story was fine, and the characters were mediocre. I didn't feel this book added anything new to the genre, though. It's not a bad book, but it just wasn't that page-turning for my taste.

#TheWeekendAway #NetGalley

My gratitude to Avon and Netgalley for this ARC.

I read three books this week, not my usual speed at all, mainly because I devoured this one in a day. Longtime friends Orla and Kate plan a weekend getaway every year and this time they go to Lisbon. They rent a cute apartment with everything they need, and they’ve made lots of plans for activities they want to pursue.

The first night they go to a high-end restaurant and afterwards to a speakeasy-type club. Kate insists on bringing two men they meet at the club home with them. Orla says, “no” but her decline falls on deaf ears. She feels very drunk so just wants to sleep.

When Orla awakes the next day Kate is gone. The rest of the book is spent looking for her, which isn't easy when you don't speak the language.

This story drew me in like a magnet because of the pull of the writing. Every sentence was well-crafted to engage the reader and many of those sentences shed culpability on most all of the characters.

Although I guessed part of the whodoneit, I was very surprised at the ending. Masterful plotting and an author I’d very much like to read again. She’s written 20 novels and YAs and writes for the TV show, S.W.A.T.