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?
Parents Weekend by Alex Finlay will be published on May 6, 2025. St. Martin's Press provided an early galley for review.
Finlay has become one of my go-to authors in recent years. His books always bring something thrilling. Combine that with a college setting (a time in my life I still look back at fondly decades later), and I was very eager to check out this new novel. I've been on both sides of the parents weekend, so this was familiar territory.
The story has a large cast; between the students, their parents, and the faculty, there are a lot of names, personalities and plot threads for the reader to juggle. The chapters are fairly short in length, though, so things move around from viewpoint to viewpoint quickly and often. Finlay knows how to end chapters to keep the reader turning the pages.
If you've read Finlay's earlier books Every Last Fear (2021) or The Night Shift (2022), you'll see a familiar face in FBI Investigator Sarah Keller. The author brings her into this story, thus loosely placing the novel in a shared world with some of his other books. Once she's brought into the investigation, the focus spends a lot of time with her. Since she's a character I find enjoyable, it kept the story moving along for me.
It was a good, cotton-candy sort of read (quick, tasty but no over-filling). Overall, I found the characters of the parents more engaging than I did the students. I suspect that's due to where I am in life.
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