Ellery was supposed to be celebrating her 20th wedding anniversary at a fancy Big Sur resort with her husband - instead she’s traveling solo, unwilling to take the hit on a nonrefundable package. And of course, the weekend she’s nursing her broken heart, a wedding is taking place. But then, suddenly, news comes that the wedding has been called off. And then Ellery makes a discovery that turns her relaxing getaway into a nightmare. Not to mention, the weather takes a turn, leaving the guests stranded at the remote resort with dwindling supplies and power, and growing problems….

This book was a great adventure into the mountains of California. The story was well written, with little clues scattered throughout, but enough surprises hidden throughout to keep you guessing that it kept things exciting. And the characters were so well written. I really felt like I was there with the guests as they worked their way through the mystery.

Ellery was the main character here, but the supporting cast really shown bright in this book: Ravi, Nina, Olivia, and Rachel were all great characters that I enjoyed getting to know and really wanted to see more and more of. Even minor characters like Grace and Gary, Morg and Madd, etc. were well done and really made this a great read.

The ending was also very good, very satisfying. I enjoyed the story’s conclusion, though I wish we got some clarity on some aspects.

But overall, this was a spectacular book. Definitely a great summer read!

The Unwedding is a book that definitely captures your attention from the very beginning by examining the exploration of modern relationships and personal growth with mystery thrown in twists and turns. With its engaging storyline and diverse group of characters, the novel captivates readers from the start. While navigating through themes of love, self-discovery, and societal expectations, Ellery, the main character felt somewhat relatable, especially as a divorce and her journey of acceptance. While I admit there were times during the storyline I felt bored, the ending made up for the time. Overall, the book was enjoyable and I would still recommend it if you enjoy mystery mixed with self discovery.

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"The Unwedding" by Ally Condie takes readers on a thrilling ride at a wedding resort in Big Sur, where a mudslide traps guests and leads to a series of mysterious deaths. Ellery, reeling from her recent divorce, finds herself entangled in the chaos when she stumbles upon the body of the groom, turning her solo retreat into a suspenseful nightmare. The novel starts strong with gripping chapters that promise a compelling thriller experience, setting up a suspenseful atmosphere amidst a backdrop of luxurious settings and intriguing characters.

However, as the story progresses, some readers, including myself, found the plot twists and turns to be a bit contrived. What begins as a promising murder mystery loses steam in the middle, where the pacing slows and the narrative complexities fail to deliver the anticipated thrills. The ending, meant to tie everything together, felt underwhelming and left me wanting more resolution and satisfaction from the storyline.

Despite these drawbacks, there are bright spots in Condie's writing, especially in her ability to weave personal themes of loss, family dynamics, and healing into the murder mystery. The novel's structure, with daily cards featuring quotes and weather forecasts, adds a unique touch that enhances the setting's atmosphere. Characters like Ellery and her newfound friends Nina and Ravi bring depth to the story, although some supporting characters outshine the main cast with their intriguing personalities.

In conclusion, while "The Unwedding" offers a promising premise and atmospheric setting reminiscent of Agatha Christie mysteries, it may not fully satisfy readers looking for a tightly woven, suspenseful narrative throughout. Despite its flaws, it's worth considering for its initial intrigue and thematic exploration, though opinions vary widely among readers.

Ally Condie knocked her debut adult thriller out of the park. This would 100% be the perfect book club read.. This book had the perfect blend of healing, love, pain, mystery and thriller all wrapped up into one. Ellery is going through a tough divorce and takes a vacation on her own where she meets Nina and Ravi. (Side note I freaking loved these two). When she gets to the resort there is a wedding happening, The day of the wedding the groom cancels and that evening is found dead in the pool.

Picture Agatha Christie having a real life game of clue in a fancy resort with 3 amateur sleuths, a hot guy, a gun and some dead people - oh and a lot of money.

All of the characters will having you scratching your head wondering what is really going on.

A divorcee goes on a solo trip to the California coast to recover from the end of her marriage. The remote hotel that she's chosen is hosting a wedding the same weekend. When someone turns up dead and a storm isolates all of the guests, everyone becomes a suspect

I LOVE a wedding thriller, so I dropped everything to listen to this book when Hachette Audio gave me the ALC. When you look at Goodreads, THE UNWEDDING is listed first as a mystery and then as a thriller--it's solidly more mystery than thriller, but I still enjoyed it. The "trapped at an isolated resort after a big storm" setting is one of my favorites! I enjoyed following these amateur detectives as they worked to unravel the mystery before the police could get there. I can't say the reveal blew me away, but it was still a fun mystery with a great setting.

The narrator Christine Lakin really made this one for me! Her performance gave this read an air of suspense that I think would have been missing in the physical read.

As Condie's first adult book it did feel a bit YA, but I suppose that's to be expected as she shifts audiences in her writing. The mystery, the plot and the story was fun and entertaining but I did feel like it has been written before. I also don't love the end and the reveal on what happened, I needed more bread crumbs to be involved as a reader. I'll definitely read her next adult book.

Thank you to NetGalley and Grand Central Publishing for the gifted e-copy of this book.

Huge thank you to Grand Central Publishing for the free book!

3.5 stars

The beginning of this book really started out with a bang and caught my attention!

The main character, Ellery, is on her way to a fancy pants resort all alone. She should have been going with her husband to celebrate their 20th anniversary, but let's just say, things don't always go as planned. When she arrives and realizes there is a wedding happening on the resort, she still sets out to make the most of it, that is until she finds the groom dead!

Overall, I thought this was a pretty entertaining read but it did slow down for me quite a bit in the middle, especially after such a promising start. While I did like how there were some flashbacks interspersed throughout the story to add an extra layer of dimension, that storyline didn't always quite make sense to me and I felt a little lost at the ending.

I think this will be a big hit this summer especially considering it's a Reese Bookclub Pick!

Ellery goes to an exclusive resort on what would have been her 20th anniversary, but she is now divorced. There is a wedding taking place at the resort which adds to Ellery's dismay. Also there's a dead body and missing guests.

This one was a little lackluster to me. I had a hard time getting past Ellery's constant whining about her divorce and what should have been. The mystery aspect was good and I was interested in what would happen as the story went on. I liked the setting. It was beautifully described.

Thanks to netgalley and Grand Central Publishing for the arc.

Great setup but kind of fizzled at the end.

From the beginning, I was all in. Remote resort setting, cut off from the world, unexplained deaths, mysterious happenings--how intriguing! And yet, it was just so convoluted and slow for all of those great elements!

Ellery is going through a very painful divorce, and rather than lose her money, she decides to go alone to the amazing resort in Big Sur, California, that she and her husband had booked for their 20th anniversary. The resort is high end and glamorous, the site for a wedding to occur that weekend as well. However, a giant storm arrives, and Ellery finds the groom's dead body in the swimming pool, still dressed in his wedding clothes. Then a landslide cuts off access to the outside world and they lose all phone communication as well. Ellery and some of the other guests take it upon themselves to investigate the death to discover who might have wanted the groom dead and why.

I was really interested in this book because the tag line says it is Agatha Christie meets White Lotus--basically this book was a "locked room" mystery a la And Then There Were None, set at a White Lotus style resort with correspondingly rich characters. Yet, it didn't really deliver in the end. I found the entire armchair detecting storyline to just be really silly, and the reasons for all of the mysterious goings-on were kind of eye rolling to me.

After the exciting setup, it was like the author couldn't figure out where to go from there, and there were people who went missing, bizarrely convoluted side stories like missing pieces of art--in fact, there was SO much emphasis on the individual pieces of art and who created them and the stories behind them that I just glazed over, because it was so irrelevant. In the end the tale had too many characters and side storylines and it just fizzled. It could have been tighter with more editing and more focus.

I did like Ellery and the information about her life and her struggles was well written. But the rest was just too much and too many extraneous tangents to keep my interest. For a book that was only 320 pages it felt so very much longer than that. I had to force myself to go back to it.

I received a free eARC from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

The blurb describes this as White Lotus meets Agatha Christie, and for once it’s pretty spot on. You’ve got a beautiful, exclusive, remote location, lots of rich people, and (eventually) a dead body. It’s also White Lotus-ish in that the characters are interesting, but the mystery itself is kind of meh (and it all plays out at the end in that annoying way where the character who figured everything out just…monologues for a few pages to explain what happened. I hate that!).

Our main character is Ellery, a high school teacher who is going through a tough divorce. She and her husband had already paid for this fancy trip to Big Sur, and since she couldn’t get a refund, she decided to go alone. But of course there’s a big fancy wedding happening at the resort the same weekend, which is exactly what Ellery wants to see and hear about. I can relate - doing things by yourself that you’d planned to do with your (now) ex is TOUGH. I probably would have spent the entire weekend in the room, but to her credit Ellery does try to enjoy herself. She ends up befriending Ravi and Nina, a pair of friends who vacation together a lot (sidebar: these people all read as MUCH younger than I think they are meant to be. Maybe that’s because I know Condie as a YA writer, so it’s personal bias? But every character read like a 20-something, and they’re not all in that age bracket!). They all basically become instant BFFs, and it’s sort of like a summer camp friendship (which may also be why I felt like they read as younger than the 40s-50s I think they actually were!). Ravi and Ellery crash the wedding rehearsal cocktails, where Ellery spends 12 seconds talking to the bride, but the next evening, the bride’s mother comes into the dining room and announces that the wedding isn’t happening, so all of the regular guests can just go ahead and enjoy the catered dinner. Of course, Ravi and Nina are immediately intrigued by what went down at the ceremony (Ellery also makes friends with one of the groomsmen, Ben’s friend Andy, while on a hike earlier in the day on Saturday). But it isn’t until the next day when a body is discovered - Ben, the groom, floating in the pool, with a definite head injury. And if that’s not bad enough, there’s a terrible storm and a mudslide, which means everyone is trapped at the resort. I remember visiting this same area in 2018, and parts of that road were STILL closed after the 2017 storm, which they reference here (there were certain places that you could come at from the north but not the south, based on where the bridge was washed out).

Ellery is also hiding Deep Personal Trauma (in addition to divorce trauma). A few years earlier, she and her friend Abby and their track team were on the way home from a meet when they were in an awful bus crash. We hear about all of it in flashback, and while I completely get Ellery not wanting to dwell on it too much, it’s also all dealt with as though it’s much shadier than it actually is. I also thought it was going to have some bearing on the stuff that happens at the resort, but it doesn’t. Like, at all. She obviously feels some responsibility for what happened - she’s a teacher, she should have been able to keep her kids safe (even though that’s completely irrational, as a former teacher I totally get it). And it seems like it probably led to the dissolution of her marriage because her husband was a real dick about how long it took her to “get over” the experience. But like…the way it’s referenced and talked about makes it seem as though she and Abby *did* something to cause the accident, or that maybe the person who hit the bus was going to end up being somehow connected to Ben and Olivia and the wedding folk. It’s a personal backstory that definitely creates sympathy for Ellery, but ultimately it feels superfluous.

The mystery itself is, again, sort of meh. It might play out better on screen, where you could *see* some of this happen, rather than listening to Ellery monologue about it all at the end. I get that, as the only singleton in the group, she’s able to observe things in a way the rest of them can’t, but that still doesn’t make it interesting to just listen to someone explain it. Maybe if we’d had more of a rotating perspective? But then it wouldn’t have made as much sense for Ellery to have been the one to figure it all out.

This makes it seem like I didn’t enjoy the book, but I mostly did! It’s bonkers, but enjoyably so. I do wish the pacing had been a little different - all of these major reveals happen within the last 15 pages and it’s very jarring. Again, it’s one of those stories that would probably play out better on screen.

After a painful divorce, Ellery Wainwright decides to vacation alone at the luxurious Resort at Broken Point in Big Sur, California, for what was supposed to be her twentieth-anniversary trip with her now ex-husband. Ellery is yet to come to terms with the end of her marriage and a wedding being held at the resort doesn’t make it any easier. In a shocking turn of events, Ellery discovers the body of the groom in the hotel pool after it was assumed that he had absconded leaving his fiancée at the altar. With inclement weather trapping them inside the resort, the wedding guests and other travelers are cut -off from any help from the outside and after another member of the wedding arty is found dead under mysterious circumstances, Ellery and her new friends Nina and Ravi join the search for the killer - not an easy task with a hotel full of guests among whom are people with secrets they would kill to protect. Complicating matters further are rumors of missing items from the resort’s renowned art collection indicating the presence of a thief as well as a murderer. Ellery is desperate to get go home to her children, but with no way out of the resort and with a killer in their midst, she struggles to keep it together as she is drawn into a complex web of lies, secrets, murder and deception.

I’m a fan of Agatha Christie mysteries and I loved The White Lotus, so when a book is described as “The White Lotus meets Agatha Christie”, you can’t blame this reader for going in with high expectations.

Let me begin by saying that I loved the premise, the atmospheric setting and the suspenseful vibe and liked that the author wove Ellery’s personal journey into the murder mystery narrative. The novel is well-structured and I thought that beginning each chapter with a brief description of a card left for the guests daily featuring a quote, a brief weather forecast and details about one piece of artwork featured in the in-house collection was a nice touch. I could sympathize with Ellery and did like how the author addressed themes of loss, family, trust, grief and healing. I enjoyed the first half of the novel but was more than a tad disappointed as the narrative progressed. Firstly, I didn’t find any of the main characters particularly interesting (in fact I liked a few of the supporting characters more) and one particular detail (or omission, to be precise) annoyed me to no end. Moreover, plot development in the second half of the novel left a lot to be desired. As far as the “mystery” goes, the plot became convoluted and long drawn, the twists felt contrived for the most part, and the ending was overall unsatisfying. I couldn’t wait for the book to end, eventually losing interest long before the final reveal.

Though there were aspects of the story I did like, I had hoped for a more engaging mystery and that’s where The Unwedding by Ally Condie fell short for me. However, many have enjoyed this novel more than I did and I would request you to read other reviews before making a decision about reading this one.

Many thanks to Grand Central Publishing for the digital review copy via NetGalley.

This was just an average read for me. I was sort of confused on the mystery involving the art so I wasn’t connecting with the story. I thought it took too long to let the reader know what had happened to Ellery in her past. Also, the ending was so freaking long! Once we found out who the murder was I thought it would wrap up nicely, but we got like three more chapters (which I just skimmed).

Thank you to Novel Suspects Insiders Club for allowing me to read this ARC! #novelsuspects

I can see why The Unwedding is showing up on summer must-read lists everywhere and why it's also at least one celebrity bookclub pick. It's because it's fabulous! Locked room mysteries are my absolute favorite, and The Unwedding nails all the critical aspects. There's a full cast of characters, which is essential for a whodunit, but they're portrayed in such a way that they're easy to keep track of them individually and their relationships. A luxury resort cutoff from everyone due to severe weather and a washed-out bridge makes for the perfect setting. When so many books don't live up to the hype of must-read lists and bookclubs, The Unwedding does, With a totally unpredictable ending, I can see it being in beach bags everywhere this summer!

The Unwedding follows Ellery, recent divorcee, who travels to a resort in Big Sur, CA bc she absolutely cannot let her ex go where they were supposed to celebrate their 20th anni with his new gf. After she finds a dead groom, she realizes maybe she should’ve stayed home.

I haven’t read a thriller in a hot minute but this one was FUN. I love when rich people start pointing fingers at each other and Ellery is me on the sidelines, watching all the chaos. The book does follow your basic, oh no natural disaster, everyone is stuck with a killer on the loose, who can I trust?? plot - but honestly if it ain’t broke don’t fix it.

normally I get overwhelmed with the amount of characters in murder mysteries, but the author wrote them so well that it was easy to keep track. Ravi and Nina as a nosey friendship duo taking Ellery under their wing was my fav. I also loved the art descriptions and weather announcements at the beginning of each chapter!! They were so cute and made you feel like a guest at the resort.

The pacing of the book was a bit too slow in the middle and the flashbacks to Ellery’s accident didn’t really add anything to the plot, but overall I enjoyed it and I didn’t guess the ending at all soooo a successful thriller in my book.

DNF at 35% this one was quite boring, i felt so disconnected from the characters in this one. It follows all the locked formula without any magnetic characters to like.

While this book had such a good premise and so much possibility, I left feeling quite underwhelmed and wanting more. The author did a fantastic job of creating a setting of a beautiful and exclusive resort near Big Sur, California. I found that to be the most satisfying part of the book. I felt like the back story of the main character Ellery to be just a bit overdone. We get it, she's divorced and she went through an unthinkable trauma. We don't need to continuously hear about it over and over. I also felt like the cast of characters was too broad; there were so many that I didn't really end up caring about any of them. Overall, the mystery element of the story wasn't strong enough to keep me interested, and I found the plot to be so incredibly slow. I just wished that there was more to the mystery element than there was. It wasn't for me, but there are likely many who would find it entertaining.

Thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for an advanced copy of this book. All opinions within this review are my own.

The main character was complicated and intriguing so she held my interest. There were so many other characters to keep track of, I felt a bit lost. I ended up looking forward to the conclusion.

I picked this one up because it had such great reviews already. I love thrillers and it did not disappoint in that fashion! Great storyline and easy to follow and keep me reading late into the night. I didn't want to put it down!

A cozy, locked room mystery set at a luxury resort in gorgeous Big Sur. Ellery is flying solo on what was supposed to be a 20th anniversary trip with her husband Luke after he divorced her and moved on with a new girlfriend. A small wedding is being held at the resort which further adds to her misery until a pair of friends, Nina and Ravi, add her to their circle and cheer her up. When the groom shows up dead the next morning and a treacherous storm takes out the bridge and only road into the resort, the trio make it their mission to find out who killed him. Overall a fun read, but there are backstory bits interspersed throughout regarding an accident Ellery was in a few years prior that don't lend anything to the story and probably should have been cut. The ending could have used a bit of editing as well. Ellery magically figured out a number of things that were totally obscure and almost every character had a "reveal", most of which felt forced and irrelevant. Especially Nina's in my opinion.