Becca and Blake are ready for a weekend getaway. With a 1920s murder mystery theme at their beautiful hotel, what could possibly go wrong?

It all starts when the speakeasy singer turns up “murdered” - Becca takes her role seriously and is intent on using the clues to figure out who the murderer could be. But when a maid comes up missing, they start to realize it might not be of her own doing and this murder mystery might not be an act after all.

A little Great Gatsby, a little Knives Out, with a nod to Agatha Christie - “This is a super-fun pastiche with a wicked smart plot peppered with clever clues and compelling characters.”

OK. This was so fun! I love murder mystery parties, and when there's an actual murder it's even better. It was filled with interesting characters, that seemed to bring their own secrets to a murder party. You read this, and not sure if it's part of the act or if it's real secrets that are making these people act the way they do.

I did not like the MC, she was all over the place. It felt she disturbed the story more than let it flow. She hates her husband, she loves her husband, she thinks there’s a killer around, she thinks someone is stalking her, she thinks it's part of the act.. I mean, it was distracting.

Overall a good story, kind of predictable but still fun. I wanted to be part of that party.

TW> lots of alcohol, adultery, murder.

2.5 stars!

All Dressed Up follows Becca, who goes to a weekend 1920s murder mystery game in the wake of her husband's cheat. Even though she's mad at him, she's determined to have a good time. Speakeasy songstress Ida Crooner is found "murdered," so the guests have to find out what happened. Becca is excited to get her mind off things, but then the actress playing Ida's maid doesn't come to the role. Becca then must assume her role as Miss Debbie Taunte to find evidence that Ida's maid might have actually gone missing.

This book quite literally was a recipe for perfection for me. A murder mystery game? A closed circle mystery? A fun little speakeasy theme? Everything was just perfect. Unfortunately, I did not feel that this book lived up to my expectations. I felt like a lot of things were going on. It was complicated to remember the difference between the people who were at the dinner party and the characters they were playing in the murder mystery game. I also didn't really care about the drama between Becca and Blake, and every time I felt like I was getting into the mystery, the romance aspects took me out. Normally, I don't mind romance in my thrillers, but since the mystery was not really connected to them, I just didn't care. I think the premise was really great, but if it could've been executed a little better I think I would've liked it more.

A group of guests go to an estate for a murder mystery party full of clues, 1920s vibe, and mystery everyone gets into their role.

When an actual murder occurs now all the clues get intertwined and you as the reader get to try to solve who killed who and with what.

While it was a great premise, I feel that it fell flat.

This book started out strong with our MC and her husband attending a surprise weekend getaway, which turns into a murder-mystery event. You’re constantly wondering what MCs husband did to land him in a pickle, and the location the story takes place is set up really well. I was taken out of the story a bit too much at times by the reading of the murder mystery scripts and characters, and we are also inside the MC’s head - a lot.

I did find the action picking up about halfway through, and the twists and turns and the actual side characters were pretty great! If you liked Knives Out you’ll likely enjoy this one!

This one started out ok and I was excited to read it, but I just couldn't get into it and ended up being distracted. So I didn't finish this one. I am sure it is great for the right clientele and the premise seemed interesting, but it just wasn't for me.

I loved the premise of All Dressed Up by Jilly Gagnon. The general storyline follows the idea that Becca’s husband surprises her with a murder mystery weekend trip. The idea seems romantic until the reader understands that Becca’s husband plans the weekend as a mistaken way to make amends for his most recent affair.

I’ve not been to a murder mystery weekend, but the descriptions of how the weekend unfolded and all that it entailed kept me reading. Unfortunately, Becca and Blake’s marital issues got in the way of the plot for me, and made this murder mystery too much of a slow burn. I ended up finishing this one through audible and I will say that the storyline translated much better through the audiobook.

Thank you to Yewon Son, Penguin Random House and Netgalley for an advanced reader’s copy in exchange for my honest review.

A rare DNF for me. The characters never appealed enough to make me care about any of them, which wiped out the very fun element of a theatrical murder weekend with a 20s theme encasing some actual carnage. Read about a third before bailing.

A great murder mystery premise, the execution felt a bit tired and redundant. That being said, I will absolutely still give this another any try.

All Dressed Up by Jilly Gagnon is a portal to a 1920’s murder mystery game that becomes a real murder mystery. Overall this book was a miss for me and I found myself skimming through to get to the end. While the premise was interesting there ended up being too many side plots and details for me to really enjoy it.

Thank you to Netgalley and Random House Publishing Group - Ballantine for the ARC. All Dressed Up is out now!

I couldn't help but constantly compare this novel to Clue and Knives Out, which is a good thing, because both of those stories are top-notch murder mysteries that are fun, wonky, thrilling, and engrossing. I highly encourage fans of the murder mystery to pick up All Dressed Up, it's a fun ride to be sure!

Thanks to Random House & NetGalley for a digital advance reader copy. All comments and opinions are my own.

“Becca loves mysteries. I’ll give her a mystery weekend, she’ll know I love her.” Becca guesses this is what her husband Blake decided as they drove to a remote yet stunning estate for a three-day getaway. And she also thinks it’s an attempt at an apology, as Becca has recently discovered Blake’s affair, which came out of the blue after nearly 10 years of marriage.

So we have a 1920’s murder mystery game hosted at a remote mansion with a few other couples, one of which Becca and Blake already know. Even with the marital issues, Becca decides to make the best of it and go along with the costumes, characters, atmosphere, red herrings, and the “murder” of their host. The clues come fast and furious, and everyone must team up to solve the crime, while remembering that any one of them could be the murderer.

This sounded like an intriguing premise, especially when one of the actresses playing the part of the maid disappears. Now we (Becca and I) have more than one mystery to solve. Are characters acting suspiciously because they have connections to the missing maid, or because they’re just acting the part they’ve been given in the game? Since the book is told from Becca’s point of view, I was as confused as she was: “I couldn’t even tell when they were acting, whether their dropped hints and sidelong glances meant anything or whether they were all just part of the game we were playing.”

But to make things more complicated, Becca is an unreliable narrator. Blake’s betrayal has left Becca nearly unhinged, or at least that’s how it seems. She is over-the-top jealous, unable to read normal body language clues, and is often bordering on hysterics. This leads to poor decision making, putting herself in danger as she continues to look for the missing maid (the real mystery of the weekend).

I liked the way Becca justifies her immersion in murder mysteries after learning of her husband’s affair, with “every book or episode ending with a neat resolution, the chaos safely hidden away, order restored…The setting might change, but underneath they were all the same. Something terrible threatened, but every single time there was a solution. Closure. The good were exonerated and the evil was safely tucked away, episode after episode, the unchanging cadence of it pure mental balm.” That’s why I like murder mysteries, too.

We are inside Becca’s head the entire book, which wasn’t a comfortable place to be. She seemed emotionally overwrought and more frantic than necessary, while her husband was so patient and loving and tried to placate her when he could tell she was losing her grip.

I liked the premise a lot, and the climax was satisfyingly nail-biting, but I didn’t like Becca or her angst. So I’m giving this one a 3 out of 5. Still worth reading.

Becca is having a rough time. Ever since she found out that her husband Blake had been cheating on her, she has been beaten down with feelings of insecurity, jealousy, and betrayal. To help ask for forgiveness, Blake set up a weekend getaway for them, to a gorgeous hotel in the middle of nowhere. And when they show up, Becca is happy to find out that some of their best friends, Heather and Phil were there for the weekend also.

Suddenly there is a scream, and they all run to try to figure out what happened. Becca finds a maid on the floor and realizes that there is a woman lying on the floor not too far away, a pool of blood around her. She jumps in immediately and tries to help, and then realizes that no one else is reacting the way she is. She looks around and realizes that everyone else there had expected something like this to happen. It’s a theme weekend, a murder mystery, and Blake had kept that secret from her.

Becca is furious with him for not letting her into the theme of the weekend. She had known it was a 1920s theme, but the murder mystery came as a big surprise, and she felt really embarrassed to be the only person who didn’t know about it. Blake apologizes, saying that he thought she’d enjoy it since she’d been spending so much time lately watching mysteries on television. But she’d been doing that to try to process her feelings about Blake cheating on her.

Later, Becca tells the rest of the group that clearly she hadn’t known about the murder mystery, to try to save face, but no one else really cared. They understood and just wanted to have fun playing the game. So as they got into their characters, and into the alcohol, Becca’s embarrassment melts away and she starts to make new friends.

The next day, hungover but excited, the murder mystery game starts in earnest. Each person is given a character to embody, with secrets to keep and clues to offer to others. As they question each other and look around the hotel for clues, Becca starts to think something else may be going on. She sees Blake flirting with other women and tries to keep her anxiety in check. But then one of the actresses in the game, Bethany, who was playing the part of a maid, goes missing. Becca starts to question if something happened to her. The staff are saying that she had just left, but that doesn’t ring true to Becca, who had talked to her about the murder mystery when she had needed some help, and Bethany had been really excited about her role.

As Becca tries to balance her relationship issues along with the murder mystery game and the possibility of a genuine mystery at the hotel, she observes the others, keeps her eyes and ears open, and searches for clues. But will she be able to figure out what’s really happening at the hotel, or will she lose her marriage, or maybe even her life, as she gets wrapped up in a series of mysteries that may or may not even be real?

All Dressed Up is a layered murder mystery from author Jilly Gagnon. There is a lot happening in this novel, between the struggles in the marriage, the murder mystery game, and the missing maid. The variety of the characters, the way they each have their own agenda, and the way they interact almost lends the feeling of a farce. However, the seriousness of the marriage issues and the mystery of the missing woman bring a gravitas to keep the story from becoming flippant.

I enjoyed All Dressed Up. I loved the setting of the murder mystery weekend for this locked-room mystery, and the layers of secrets added a lot to the story. However, there are some issues with pacing, so reading this book takes some effort. I think it’s worth it in the end, but telling almost the entire story through Becca’s perspective adds a very emotional element that does slow things down (the only parts that weren’t through Becca’s perspective were the blurbs from the booklets that each character had in the game). But there are a lot of fun elements to All Dressed Up, and I do think some mystery readers will enjoy it. I’d recommend reading an excerpt first, to see if you think you’ll find it enjoyable.

Egalleys for All Dressed Up were provided by Bantam Books through NetGalley, with many thanks.

I love a good twisty turny book that keeps me guessing. The author brilliantly forces the reader to trust no one and to question everything. While I had my suspicions throughout, the twist at the end surprised me in more ways than one.

All Dressed Up begins with Becca and her husband Blake arriving at a manor home for a weekend away to help heal their relationship after Blake cheated. A lover of mysteries, Becca is excited to be a part of a murder mystery weekend set in the 1920s. Soon after their arrival, the game has begun and Becca attempts to focus on the game and put Blake’s betrayal at the back of her mind. By the next day, however, Becca begins to believe that a murder might actually have occurred with the manor’s maid fails to show. She simultaneously works to solve the “murder” of Ida Crooner in character and the disappearance of Bethany in real life.

This one was slightly hard to follow as you’re having to keep track of the characters in present day, as well as the characters they are playing in the murder mystery. Jilly Gagnon did a fabulous job drafting the murder mystery part of the story and the punny names and clues were fun to explore. However, I found this book dragging by the middle. Being in Becca’s head turned out to be a struggle as we were constantly reminded about Blake’s infidelity and I ended up not really enjoying her as a character very much. I felt like this book had a lot of promise, but didn’t really deliver. Trying to thread the two stories together plus having to be reminded ad nauseam about Blake’s cheating made it so you weren’t able to give any of the plotlines your full attention.

I will say that I didn’t see the ending coming, but also felt like it was quite over the top when all of the pieces came together. Plus, I became invested in the murder mystery aspect and really wanted more closure on the fictional murder of Ida. You may enjoy this one if you are better at tracking stories within stories than I am, but be prepared to be regularly reminded that Blake cheated. Thank you to Random House – Ballantine and Netgalley for providing me with this ARC.

As soon as I read the one sentence summary of this book being like CLUE meets [book:An Unwanted Guest|38240386], I was so excited to leap right in! CLUE has long been one of my favorite games and movies, and this one definitely has some strong vibes from the film! The central characters - narrator Becca and her husband Blake, head to an ornate and remote upstate NY hotel for a 1920s themed weekend away. It's a gesture on Blake's part to help them start fresh in their reconciliation after Becca's discovery of his affair. Becca doesn't immediately know that the weekend is more than historically themed - the four couples and the staff members also play roles for the weekend as part of a murder mystery show. As this was the same theme (though not the same time period) for my 16th birthday party (one of my favorite birthday parties of all time), I really enjoyed the snippets and clues that reminded me of the clues and plot we created for my own party. It just really added to my personal fun of reading this one!

But as the clues unfolded, Becca uncovers clues of her own that seem to point to a real murder - making this a genuine loved room/hotel mystery wrapped into a fictional one! These layers add to the fun, but does draw the pacing out a bit. Though really bogs down the book is Becca herself. Her character, still reeling from the betrayal of her husband, spends a good portion of the book wrapped in her own interior monologue about her marriage. Becca does work through some things in between conversations with other guests and terse interactions with her husband, but it doesn't exactly amplify the plot or its pacing. The real life murder resolution may not surprise readers, but the solution to the faux murder is more disappointing even as it functioned so well as a good red herring.

Overall, I did have fun reading this one, and I think that it would make for a good choice for a book club or discussion group, but it just wasn't quite as fast-paced as I hoped it would be. Nor were the characters as likable.

⚜️ A 1920s murder-mystery-themed story?! The premise practically screamed Agatha Christie to me, and I was all for it! Sadly, I didn’t enjoy the book as much as I hoped to.

⚜️ This is a quick read. The story moves along at a good pace and things keep happening to throw wrenches into the plot. However, at times those wrenches felt a little convoluted and convenient. There was almost too much going on at times, in my opinion of course.

⚜️ I couldn’t stand the constant bickering and misunderstandings between Becca and her husband Blake. Sometimes Becca’s behavior felt childish and incredibly unreasonable, and I just wasn’t buying it as realistic.

⚜️ I felt like most of the characters in the book were overly stereotypical and I didn’t really connect to any of them.

⚜️ The character names (for the murder mystery weekend) were fun, but not very original (e.g., Debbie Taunte, Miss Ann Thrope).

⚜️ I did enjoy the mystery within a mystery element.

⚜️ While not unique, I felt like the ending wrapped up in a realistic way.

⚜️ Considering my nitpicks, I actually didn’t hate this book. But I was a little disappointed based on my initial expectations. I really wanted to love it.

Thank you @NetGalley and @RandomHouse Bantam for an eARC of this book, which I have read and reviewed honestly and voluntarily.

Is it just me, or is there something so iconic about a bold red and black cover? Naturally, I was immediately drawn in by the artwork on All Dressed Up's cover, but it was more than that. All Dressed Up, written by Jilly Gagnon, is a mystery thriller set in a grand manor – making for an intriguing foundation for this tale.

Can one amazing getaway cure heartache? Becca isn't convinced that anything will help her get over her husband's betrayal. But she's ready to let him spend all the money he wants on trying to earn her forgiveness.

The expensive trip? A weekend in a manor hotel, which happens to host a murder mystery game with a distinct 1920s vibe. Already keyed into the idea of a mystery, Becca will find herself quickly catching on to a real mystery occurring on the grounds.

I feel like many readers have fantasized about a weekend getaway. Maybe fewer readers hoped to combine that getaway with a murder/mystery-themed hotel stay, but you've got to admit that it sounds like fun!

I'm trying to say that this was a fascinating foundation for All Dressed Up. It immediately caught my attention. I'm almost tempted to say that we didn't need the personal drama to get me invested.

Actually - I am going to say that. Becca's emotional state was downright distracting at times, and not in a good way. It was like there were two huge plots vying for center stage, and Becca kept drop-kicking the murder/mystery plot. It was frustrating! I just wanted to explore that bit of the plot for a moment.

I would advise going into All Dressed Up expecting more of an emotional read, as Becca has a lot to work through. The hotel and the mystery are more supporting characters than actual focal points. If you adjust your expectations accordingly (and don't make the same mistake I did), I can see this book being enjoyable.

Blake Wilson is trying to save his marriage, and plans a getaway for his wife Becca, thinking it'd be a fun surprise. Becca is a fan of murder mystery shows. A home that was used as a summer home once is now a tourist attraction with themes. This time it's the Roaring Twenties.

Each guest is given a character name and invited to scope out for clues to solve the mystery. One of the staff members and Becca get to know one another, but the following day, the guests are told the staff member was a no show. Becca decides to use the object she borrowed to sneak into the staff member's room and discovers personal items left behind that normally wouldn't be. When someone enters the room, Becca dives for cover and overhears a conversation.

In looking for clues, Becca's suspicions grow, but she's not sure what is the game and what is real anymore.

I loved how there were two mysteries simultaneously, which kept me guessing about both. The ending was a surprise.

I received an ARC from NetGalley via Random House Publishing Group-Ballantine and I have voluntarily reviewed this book.

There is not a lot of love for All Dressed Up by Jilly Gagnon, but I for one had a GREAT time with it. Sure, I didn't love Becca, and I wish we had some actual background on her and Blake's relationship, but I LOVED the premise and basic execution of the story. I am a huge fan of the murder mystery and have always wanted to go to a Clue-style type of weekend such as what we have in this book. There is a lot to keep track of between the characters at the hotel for the weekend on top of the staff and the characters everyone is playing as part of the game. This is why I am really glad that Gagnon had the foresight to add a list at the beginning of the book with the guests and the staff named, as well as their associated character names. She even listed them all in order of appearance, and this was such a great resource to have when I couldn't quite remember who was who.

Although it will probably confuse some people, I also loved the audiobook and that there was one narrator for Becca (Christine Lakin), plus a narrator for the other things like the unknown narrator, cast of characters, and background character information for the game (David DeSantos). Thanks to Lakin I didn't hate Becca as much as I probably could have, and DeSantos was THE perfect narrator for the other parts. He gave it that old-timey feel that was perfect for the story and he was just pleasant to listen to in general. I had 0 idea what was going on, and I did not see the whodunit coming at all. I think All Dressed Up would make a really fun movie or mini-series, and I loved getting lost in the characters and all aspects of the game. You spend a lot of time in Becca's head since she is the main narrator, but I really didn't mind it and just wish I could have gotten to know her better.

I received a complimentary copy of this book. Opinions expressed in this review are completely my own.