📚 ARC Review

The Dead Friend Project by Joanna Wallace
Viper, 11th July 2024

Beth's best friend Charlotte dies while out for a jog, but Beth is suspicious of the circumstances. Beth's life isn't a bed of roses - her husband has left her for her friend, she is taunted by the cliquey mums at the school gate, and has turned to booze as a coping mechanism.

Well-written and full of the type of humour that viewers of Motherland will approve of, Beth's tale flows well.

That said, I found Beth very hard to like. I know she had a hell of a lot going on, but she was downright mean. I am a fan of her dogged determination, though, which redeemed her a bit in my eyes.

With excellent characterisations of Beth and her friends and some highly amusing moments, this is an ideal holiday read.

⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

Thanks to Viper and Joanna Wallace for the eARC provided via NetGalley; this is my unbiased review.

Thanks to Netgalley, Serpent's Tail / Viper/ Profile Books and Joanna Wallace for the chance to read this ARC in exchange for an honest review.

I absolutely LOVED this book! It was every bit as good as her debut novel You'd Look Better As a Ghost.

The Dead Friend Project was a drama-filled, fun, tense and twisty ride of a novel. I loved every minute of it.
I was pretty much hooked by the first paragraph and I binged it in one sitting.
The characters were interesting, intense and funny.
The storyline was unique, it gave me Desperate Housewives vibes.

I'm really looking forward to seeing what Joanna comes up with next.

I very highly recommend.

5 well deserved stars from me. ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

I know from bitter experience that the school run can be murder. But this witty, sharp novel takes that premise to another level. Loved it! Thank you for the opportunity to rate and review.

***advance review copy received from NetGalley in return for an honest review***
Overall, I liked this book. It’s something like The Girl on the Train meets Motherland. The narrative is a very easy read, so you can gallop through the story quite quickly.
In the end everything ties up in an interesting way and I just admit I didn’t see it coming - I had suspected quite a different ending, but I’m glad it wasn’t what I’d thought it would be.
The one thing I struggled with is that the main character was quite hard to get behind or have any empathy towards. She is struggling, but whilst that is absolutely a key part of the narrative, I found it hard to be on her side as she was just so mean all the time. Even in flashbacks there wasn’t much that I could hold onto for why I should champion this character.

The Dead Friend Project by Joanna Wallace is the story of Beth, life hasn’t been very favourable lately. Her husband has left her for her friend, Jade. Jade runs the local nursery where her youngest daughter goes to. Her best friend Charlotte has died, she was run over last Halloween when going out for a jog. Beth misses Charlotte, she was also a good role model, she was an excellent mother, ran the primary PTA and was good at whatever she attempted.
Beth has been so bogged down being a single parent to her three children and the dog, that she doesn’t find out that Charlotte was supposedly out for a jog when she was knocked down at the bend near her house, Beth knew that Charlotte would never have left her youngest son in the house on his own.
So Beth decided to investigate the circumstances around Charlotte’s death as a project when all the children are in bed asleep. The problem with this idea is that Beth has started drinking to help life become easier. Then the alcohol then takes over and she risks losing everything that is important in her life, her children.
A fascinating look at the life of a divorced woman with children, who becomes isolated and adrift when her friend dies.
Highly recommended

This was good! I really enjoyed Joanna's other title so requested this hoping it would be as good and I really liked it. a newly single mum struggling to work out what happened to her best friend...what really happened. The case was closed as a hit and run, but this doesn't seem right. She would never have left her toddler unattended, even to train for a marathon! As the book goes on you discover more about our main character, including the classic 'unreliable narrator' due to her wine consumption! Enjoyed it, thank you!

If you've been searching for a book that deftly balances wit, drama, and a raw emotional journey, look no further than The Dead Friend Project by Joanna Wallace. This latest page-turner introduces us to Beth, a protagonist whose life is a whirlwind of chaos, grief, and relentless determination.

The story kicks off with the tragic and mysterious death of Charlotte, Beth's close friend, who is run over by a car on the night of a Halloween party. From that moment on, Beth's life spirals into a frantic and obsessive search for the truth. Her journey is fueled by an unconventional method: she uses alcohol to unlock her memories, piecing together clues while navigating her grief. This coping mechanism adds a layer of dark humour to the novel, blending comedy and tragedy in a way that reminded me of Desperate Housewives.

The interplay of loyalty, betrayal, and judgment among Beth and her fellow school mums is both relatable and engrossing. The dynamic is spiced up with screaming children, emergency room visits, and a particularly unforgettable scene involving an EpiPen and a hefty dose of dark humour. These elements inject a sense of realism and unpredictability into the story, keeping readers hooked from start to finish.

Beth herself is a hot mess, and that's putting it mildly. Her husband has left her for one of her friends, and she's constantly judged by other mums for her sweary outbursts and chaotic lifestyle. Yet, amidst the turmoil, Beth's spirit and sense of justice shine through. Her character is deeply flawed, but it's these imperfections that make her so relatable. Readers will find themselves rooting for her, even as she stumbles through her grief and the messiness of life.

However, The Dead Friend Project isn't without its shortcomings. As much as the book is a fun read, it does become somewhat repetitive. Beth's cycle of drinking, memory recovery, and clue finding can feel a bit formulaic after a while. Despite this, Wallace's sharp wit and the emotional depth she brings to the story help to mitigate this issue.

The Dead Friend Project is a delightful mix of drama and humour, offering a candid look at grief, friendship, and the pursuit of justice. While it may have its repetitive moments, the book's engaging plot and relatable characters make it a worthwhile read.

The Dead Friend Project follows Beth who becomes obsessed with the death of her best friend Charlotte and is determined to prove it wasn’t an accident.

I really enjoyed Joanna Wallace’s last book so was excited for this one but it didn’t really hit the spot for me unfortunately. It’s a dark comedy that focuses much more on the politics of being a mum at the school gates and dealing with other mums than it does the underlying mystery which I wasn’t a huge fan of but I know a lot of people will be.

It was funny and fast paced, just wasn’t really a big hit for me personally.

Told from the perspective of Beth, who is not in a good place after her best friend was killed and her husband left her to live with one of her friends. Beth has a drink problem which has added to her other problems and her need to find out what happened to Charlotte. The pace is quite slow but the book is at times poignant and at times funny as the pressure within the friendship group of playground mothers leads to funny and recognizable events, playdates, providing healthy snacks etc. The characterizations are well portrayed and Beth's trains of thought are followable, though at times you start wondering about her obsession. I started this book, put it down because I couldn't get in the mindset to read it and picked it up again a few days later. I`m glad I did now
Thanks to Net Galley for the ARC

School gate mums in a twisty murder mystery

With finely delineated characters and a twisty plot set in playgrounds, middle class kitchens and children's playdates. this is a highly readable novel. As with every good mystery, there are red herrings galore, plausible motives, and a fallible lead in Beth, recently divorced with three small children and a frenemy group that's fractured a year after the death of Beth's best friend Charlotte. As Beth navigates her new life with ex-husband and his new partner, one of Beth's former friends, she starts putting two and two together about Charlotte's death, and now what was deemed an accident by the police seems much more sinister.

I really enjoyed this, empathising with Beth's situation but failing to see the loveable woman that she was before her friend's death. The mystery was well written and plotted, keeping the narrative flowing, but the ending abruptly looms with only two or three pages to go, and offers no clue to what the resolution might be. Very cinematic but disorienting.

Three and half stars, rounded up to four.

I loved the author’s last book & I was looking forward to this new standalone which I hoped would be written in the same quirky style. I wasn’t disappointed.

For any parent who has to run the gauntlet of a primary school playground, it can be a daunting place. For Beth, through whose eyes we see the world, it is just one more thing to overcome - her best friend has recently died, her husband has gone off with another former friend & she is an in denial, semi-functioning alcoholic. She can’t stand playdates, pushy mums, PTAs, yoga or tombolas. Emily, in the enclave of friends, is an absolute scream, I loved her & I think I definitely know one or two! There is a mystery too - Beth is convinced that when her friend Charlotte died, it wasn’t an accident & is determined to prove it. Unfortunately, she does her best thinking when having a wine or three.

Brilliantly written with some real laugh out loud moments; I’m so glad that I’ve left those years behind me. Some super red herrings along the way but is the truth hidden under the rock that isn’t a rock? IYKYK. Recommended.

Beth's life is a bit of a mess. Her husband has ran off with one of her friends, her best mate Charlotte died after being hit by a car, she has three active children, a dog and a drinking problem that causes memory loss. She's struggling to cope and is starting to wonder whether Charlotte's death was really an accident. Can she piece together her fragmented memories to come up with a coherent answer.

The death of her best friend Charlotte sent Beth into an alcohol spiral. Even a year later, she still questions how she died. She believes it was murder rather than a tragic accident but is she in the right state of mind to figure things out. This could cost her everything.

This was an interesting read. The plot gets lost a little in the drama of Beth's life up until the end. I did like how it all came together and the ending was well written. I did just about figure the truth of Charlotte's death before the ending and it was clever. The characters are not overly likeable but in many ways it fits with the plot really well. Beth is a trainwreck for much of the story and you just dont know what to believe. I did feel sorry for Danielle though. A twisted thriller.

The Dead Friend Project was pitched to me as Motherland with murder and that feels pretty spot on upon reflection. It has that biting familiarity we’ve all seen in drawing on types of people that get under our skin a little, but also a hidden warmth amidst the mystery and potential murder.

Joanna Wallace has my full attention. I thoroughly enjoyed the deadly and darkly comic You’d Look Better as a Ghost and how surpassingly poignant it was in its exploration of grief, as well as its complex female protagonist. These prove to be celebrated hallmarks of Wallace’s work as similar themes emerge in The Dead Friend Project. The humour was fantastic – it is often bleakly comic, but also observationally. In particular Wallace takes aim at the different mum archetypes you may see at the school gates or in a PTA committee. I loved how it looks at this as both vacuous posturing in an unspoken competition and a genuine attempt at creating community and friendship. It allows for nuance.

Beth is a fractured and deeply flawed protagonist. She’s a bit snarky, a bit grumpy and fairly bitter at the world, but she’s also deeply kind, loyal and determined to try and do her best where she can. You get a sense of just how deeply Charlotte’s loss has hit here and also the loss of her marriage – it sets her off on a downward spiral aided by addiction, shown through alcoholism. There’s that thin line that Wallace explores so well. It adds a dramatic layer in terms of missed memories and blackouts that feed into the wider picture, but also an emotional layer of how deeply it has transformed her and her personality. It was executed so well in my opinion.

The central mystery is always fixated around the question of if there even is a mystery here to solve. There’s odd clues and prickling of suspicion at things that seem a little too coincidental, but then you remember you’re in the headspace of a deeply unreliable character. Wallace plays with this tension perfectly, keeping you guessing throughout. Some of the revelations that come in the final third of this book were jaw-dropping and utterly brilliant.

The Dead Friend Project cements Wallace as a must read author for me. This is an incredibly and emotionally fraught mystery that invests so much heart and humanity into its protagonist. It’ll make you laugh and make you cry.

Standards are surely slipping in suburbia when murder is allowed to interrupt wine o’clock. It’s a particularly thorny issue for the now terminally misanthropic Beth, who has been relying on the support of her old friend vino since the death of her actual friend, Charlotte, around a year ago. Charlotte died after being hit by a car while out for a nighttime run, an incident that was quickly deemed a tragic accident by both the authorities and Charlotte’s friends and family.

While Charlotte’s untimely death has been a tragedy for the whole community—she was a marathon-running, charity-fundraising, well-respected A&E doctor who also ran the PTA and found time to dress up as the school’s Easter bunny, after all—Beth has been left especially bereft. And her emotional state has not been helped by her husband choosing the day after Charlotte’s death as the day to announce his affair and his intention to leave Beth and shack up with her (former) friend, Jade. It’s enough to turn anyone to drink.

It’s little wonder that time has passed in a bit of a blur for Beth since then. However, the start of a new school year brings a rare moment of clarity and a startling revelation for Beth. Indeed, a playground encounter with her frenemies reveals that Charlotte’s youngest son was left alone in the house on the night she supposedly went for the fateful run. Beth knows that there is no way Charlotte—a true supermum—would have left her son home alone. Not to go for a run. Not for anything.

But if Charlotte didn’t leave the house voluntarily on the night in question, is it really safe to assume that her death was an accident? How likely is it really that she would have run into the road in the dark without first checking for traffic? Beth begins to suspect that she’s been too blinded by grief and rage and a whole host of other emotions to recognise that there was something very wrong about Charlotte’s death. Determined to correct her mistake, Beth decides to dedicate her limited child-free time to detective work.

The Dead Friend Project is another superb blend of dark humour and intriguing mystery from Joanna Wallace. Subverting and exposing the thoroughly middle-class setting of a dormitory town somewhere outside of Oxford—where everyone is entirely respectable and everything is meticulously ordered and organised—by portraying it through the eyes of a jaded, miserable and often drunk resident is a masterstroke. Even without the possibility of murder, its clear that people would much rather problems simply disappear.

And Beth has certainly become a problem.

In addition to the drinking, she’s too loud, she swears too much, she asks awkward questions and she just can’t bear to pretend that everything is fine and the minutia of child-centric daily life are all-important. Wallace skewers many of the stereotypes of the competitive school mum clique, both through Beth’s acerbic and/or confused contributions to conversations and through her gloriously irritated internal monologue. It’s becoming clear that she’s an embarrassment to the other mums but also that they might be hiding something far more sinister than snobbery.

But is that what her former friends really think or is it Beth’s self-doubt and self-loathing speaking? While Emily and her Pritt Stick-loving posse are overly precious and somewhat consumed with preserving their social standing, meaning that Beth’s witty observations are often accurate, she’s still the epitome of an unreliable narrator. She’s so addled by unhappiness that she can’t always see people’s true character. Plus, her drinking causes memory lapses, which means she can’t be sure of what happened in the past or is happening in the present.

Memory issues are far from helpful for a sleuth, whether amateur or professional, but Beth is aware of her issues and perseveres despite them. She’s quite admirably determined in fact, and she’s far from the first literary detective to be their own worst enemy. As sober Beth can only remember fragments of what drunk Beth discovers, and given that those memories are questionable at best, there’s a constantly shifting set of clues and suspects, which renders the mystery twisted and largely unguessable.

While the majority of The Dead Friend Project is set in the present day as Beth attempts to unravel the puzzle behind Charlotte’s death and stop her own life from imploding, there are scenes from the past—from around the time of the incident—interspersed throughout. These scenes provide glimpses into Beth’s life before her best friend died and her husband left her, indicating that she might have been troubled even before tragedy struck, and they also flesh out events and characters that she has difficulty remembering or describing accurately.

Through highlighting the sinister side of the most mundane things and allowing Beth to clearheadedly observe the eccentricities and oddness of those around her, Wallace manages to make even playdates and schools fetes seem macabre. The disorientation associated with Beth’s memory lapses exacerbates the confusion related to grief and the flailing need to find someone to blame. Together, these aspects result in an atmosphere of tension and danger that permeates The Dead Friend Project even as the gallows humour flows thick and fast.

Dark, laugh-out-loud funny, messy, vibrant, and addictive, this was an absolute riot. I loved Joanna Wallace’s debut and couldn’t wait to pick this one up. And when I did I devoured it in under a day, unable to put it down once I’d started.

It follows Beth, a woman who is teetering on the edge. Nothing has gone right for her since her husband left her for her friend. She’s struggling with single parenthood, the other mum’s judge her for swearing too much, and her drinking is becoming a problem. She’s a hot mess. And to make things even worse, the only person she can turn to, her best friend Charlotte, was killed the same night her husband left. But when Beth discovers that Charlotte left her young son home alone that night she immediately becomes suspicious. The Charlotte she knew would never be so irresponsible, and she begins to question if her friend’s death really was an accident. With a new found sense of purpose, Beth sets out to uncover the truth about that night….

Joanna Wallace is proving herself to be a must-read author for anyone who loves a darkly comic thriller. Deftly plotted, acutely observed and charged with adrenaline, she manages to walk that fine line of being both absolutely hilarious and deeply moving. A story of friendship, loss, grief and obsession, there are some difficult topics woven into the narrative. Dark secrets, fractured people, and complex relationships inhabit the pages, creating a melting pot of disaster ripe for boiling over. And when it does, no one will come out unscathed. Everyone is a suspect and, like Beth, I didn’t trust anyone. I loved that Wallace used certain details to make the reader suspect characters, adding to the suspicion, mistrust and unease. I was on the edge of my seat, my heart thumping, as the tension sizzled on the pages.

Beth was a great protagonist. It’s not just her life that‘s a disaster, she is too, and it’s like she’s determined to self-destruct. I liked that she wasn’t a picture-perfect mum and had a lot of empathy for all she was going through, but I also really wanted to give her a shake. She becomes increasingly obsessed with discovering what happened to Charlotte but she is an unreliable narrator, so it was hard to know if we could trust her recollections, discoveries and suspicions. Were the pieces she’s putting together real or the overactive imaginings of a grieving woman? As the story went on she became increasingly unstable, something that seemed inevitable with her alcohol consumption and being surrounded by people she suspects of murder. The other mums and playground politics are perfectly written and I think all parents have met mothers like the ones on these pages. It certainly took me back to the days I used to do the school run and all the clique-filled drama that was part of it.

Propulsive, tense and twisting, The Dead Friend Project is a riveting ink-black comedy not to be missed.

The characters in this book will be instantly recognisable to anyone who has ever run the gauntlet of the school run. It's hard to believe that the majority of schools across the land has the same mix and dynamic of playground politics and cliques of people involved. There's the PTA clan, those mums who are perfectly turned out every trip in all the right gear with their faultless hair and make up, and the sweary mum who feels like she will never make the grade or be accepted into any of the established groups.

Jo Wallace has captured the scenario perfectly and underscored within it a thread of humour which will have you laughing out loud throughout. Beth is desperately trying to hold her shattered life together without the two people she thought she would have beside her forever: her husband Rowan and her best friend Charlotte. With 3 kids and a loveable dog to contend with every day, she's rarely the priority. Then one day she overhears something which gets her mind working overtime and gives her a project to focus on. Who Killed Charlotte and Why?

There are a workable number of characters in this book so I never felt overwhelmed by who was who, but there are enough suspects for Beth to weave into the mix and form motives for. By the end I think most people have been put under the microscope but will Beth be satisfied that she has solved the mystery?

This book drew me in and kept me amused. I don't recommend reading it in public though unless you want to attract attention to yourself because I promise you won't be able to hold those giggles in.

3-3.5/5 - this was funny and actually had me laughing out loud at parts but I also felt there was a bit too much going on and some of the banter felt forced.

Beth's life is a bit of a mess. Her husband ran off with one of her friends, her best mate Charlotte died after being hit by a car, she has three active children, a dog and a drinking problem that causes memory loss. She's struggling to cope and is starting to wonder whether Charlotte's death was really an accident. Can she piece together her fragmented memories to come up with a coherent answer?

An engaging read, with some laugh-out-loud moments.

Certainly a very different kind of read for me.

Beth has an awful lot to deal with: her best friend, Charlotte, has died, she is struggling to lose the baby weight after the birth of her daughter, her husband has left her for another 'friend' and, to crown it all, her son falls from the climbing wall at school when he's under her supervision and the first day of school ends up in A&E. Life is, at best, a struggle and niggling at the back of her mind is the thought that Charlotte's death wasn't the accident it's been labelled as. And, despite everything else going on, that thought just won't go away ...

I liked the character of Beth, although I did struggle with her choices at times. Her determination to get to the bottom of Charlotte's death is what keeps her going through the darkest of days. What niggled at me is that an awful lot of her 'discoveries' were supposition on her part and there wasn't really anyone playing devil's advocate. Quite enjoyable though and, for me, 4*.

My thanks to the publisher for my copy via NetGalley; this is = as always - my honest, original and unbiased review.