The Party in the Woods by Fiona McPhillips starts with a familiar thriller setup: a group of old friends reunites years after a terrible event, hoping to make sense of what happened and perhaps put their past behind them. I’ll admit that I wasn’t sure I wanted to read another version of this story. I’ve read enough thrillers built around this premise that they’ve started to blur together, and a trope that works well the first few times can lose its appeal when authors keep returning to it. Fortunately, McPhillips has more on her mind than resurrecting old secrets and watching former friends turn against one another. What begins as a familiar mystery develops into a compelling examination of class, economic insecurity, and the choices people make when the systems around them offer little hope of a fair outcome.
Annie Fagan spent her early twenties immersed in Ireland’s illegal rave scene, playing electronic music and producing tracks as one of the country’s first female DJs. Her circle of friends included Fran Baker, a man she once believed she would end up with, and Seán, whose disappearance after a party in the woods changed the course of her life. Annie eventually left that world behind, but years later, the discovery of Seán’s body in the Dublin mountains brings the past crashing into her present. As new information emerges, the possibility that Seán died at the hands of someone who attended the party forces Annie to reconsider the people she once trusted. The mystery draws her back into a social circle she thought she had escaped, even as the life she has built since then becomes increasingly precarious.
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