‘The Wedding Party’ by Rebecca Heath

Published by Head of Zeus,
30 January 2025.
ISBN: 978-1-035913121-1 (PB)

The Wedding Party begins with a short, dry newspaper account of the search for an unnamed wedding guest who has disappeared from the deck of a luxury yacht, presumed to have fallen overboard and drowned. Was it suicide or was he pushed? With this single flourish, Heath draws in her readers from the first sentence, grabs us by the scruff of our necks, and doesn’t relinquish her grip until we reach the novel’s end, with its curious but gripping twist.

Set on the south Australian coast, the novel focuses on the wedding of Adele and Jason, friends since childhood. The ceremony, scheduled for January 2025, will be witnessed by friends and family at ‘Refuge Bay,’ a magically beautiful oceanside site in the vicinity of Adelaide where most of them once spent happy summers in simple holiday shacks, an idyll irrevocably spoilt twelve years earlier when a boy called Ollie died after a jump from a jetty. It’s another problematic death. Ollie’s doting mother is convinced it was murder and is determined to wreak revenge while other characters describe it (but perhaps self-servingly) as an accident. Complicating the situation is the fact Ollie and Adele once had been a couple.

The story is told from the perspective of half a dozen people and frequently switches from the present – the week before and counting down until the wedding – to twelve years earlier, when we are provided the context of how and why Ollie died. Heath keeps up the suspense, springing one unexpected revelation after another accompanied by suitably dramatic, emotional responses from her cast. The characters are mostly unlikeable, but it doesn’t matter. They each possess secrets and tell lies to conceal them. We root for some of these vividly drawn individuals and feel repelled by others.  The Wedding Party is the proverbial page-turner, and we can’t help compulsively reading it to discover the answers to questions posed on nearly every page. 

It is somehow satisfying while predictable that the wedding itself is a string of disasters. We are rewarded by a denouement that, if not completely believable, is enjoyably thrilling. Rebecca Heath has reconfigured the traditional murder mystery as soap opera in The Wedding Party. Recommended as a fun beach read.
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Reviewed by Wendy Jones Nakanishi/aka Lea O’Harra

Rebecca Heath studied science at university, worked in hospitality and teaching, but she always carved out time to write. She lives in Adelaide, Australia, halfway between the city and the sea with her husband, three children and a much-loved border collie. She spent her childhood summers at a remote beach not unlike where the novel is set. This is her debut adult novel. 

Lea O’Harra.  An American by birth, did her postgraduate work in Britain – an MA in Lancaster and a doctorate at Edinburgh – and worked full-time for 36 years at a Japanese university. Since retiring in March 2020, she has spent part of each year in Lancaster and part in Takamatsu on Shikoku Island, her second home, with occasional visits to the States to see family and friends. An avid reader of crime fiction since childhood, as a university professor she wrote academic articles on it as a literary genre and then decided to try her hand at composing such stories herself, publishing the so-called ‘Inspector Inoue mystery series’ comprising three murder mysteries set in rural, contemporary Japan. She has also published two standalone crime fiction novels.