At first, it appears as if The Wedding Night is going to be a straightforward psych thriller. But Clare Boyd has much more in store for the reader.
We know from the prologue that there is a wedding gone awry and that someone has disappeared. Are the two linked? How? And whose wedding is it?
The story is told from multiple points of view. We have Amy and William, Amy’s daughter (Tess), and William’s son (Hal). A mysterious “Me” also has a few chapters here and there. That’s a lot of characters.
And there is a LOT going on between them.
Amy and Tess are moving in with William and Hal. It soon becomes clear whose wedding night is going to be a wreck. But we don’t get to that until much later in the plot. In fact, a lot of the book feels like there are several separate plotlines that have nothing to do with each other…until they do.
Eventually, they all come to a head at roughly the same time. They are not interwoven as much as separate roads that converge on the same intersection. It is a different approach from several other psych thrillers.
In fact, it often feels like there is almost too much going on. I got invested in each of the individual timelines so much that by the time the climax (the wedding night) occurs, it felt almost…meh. Not that it wasn’t a good meeting of the plot threads. But the build-up was more interesting to me.
The resolutions after the climax also seemed to go very quickly – almost as if the author was just trying to wrap it up.
There is also an underlying current of William and Hal and their alleged wealth being an issue for Amy and Tess. How Tess changes when she meets new friends in the new posh school, and things like that. But it never feels completely developed – the reader is told it is an issue more than actually seeing a lot of it.
That’s not entirely accurate, but I’m not sure how else to describe it.
That being said, The Wedding Night still had me turning pages late into the night to see what would happen next. Clare Boyd does write a complex psych thriller, and I look forward to the next one.
