Liza North’s sophomore novel, “The Weekend Guests,” presents a psychological thriller that twists the familiar trope of the reunion weekend into something far more sinister. Following her debut “Obsessed” (which was longlisted for the UK Crime Writers’ Association’s John Creasey First Novel Dagger award), North demonstrates her skill at crafting a narrative where the weight of past sins bears down on present lives with devastating consequences.
Set against the dramatically unstable landscape of England’s Jurassic Coast, the novel follows five former university friends who gather for a weekend at a luxurious clifftop house. What begins as an awkward reunion soon spirals into a deadly reckoning as anonymous threats force them to confront a long-buried crime. North skillfully employs a dual timeline narrative, shifting between events in 2002 and 2019, gradually revealing how one moment of carelessness and subsequent cover-up can send shock waves through decades.
Layers of Deception
The novel’s greatest strength lies in its intricate structure—a geological metaphor for the layered deceptions of its characters. Just as the Dorset coast is formed of Triassic, Jurassic, and Cretaceous strata, North builds her narrative in stages, each revelation adding pressure to the unstable foundation below.
The story unfolds through multiple perspectives, primarily those of the five former friends:
- Aline: The magnetic, manipulative host whose renovated clifftop home serves as the reunion setting
- Brandon: Aline’s American husband, increasingly disillusioned with his marriage
- Michael: Still harboring an unrequited love for Aline despite his marriage to Nikki
- Rob: The perpetual bachelor whose womanizing masks deeper insecurities
- Sienna: Recently separated and returning from California with twin daughters and unspoken motivations
Most intriguing is the inclusion of Darryl Arniston’s perspective through diary entries from 2002. As an unstable outsider to the friend group, his obsessive documentation provides crucial context to the mystery while raising questions about reliability and truth.
The novel also introduces Milly, the teenage nanny whose connection to the group’s past crime gradually emerges as the most consequential thread in the narrative. Her storyline provides the emotional core that elevates the novel beyond mere thriller conventions.
Atmospheric Tension and Inevitable Collapse
North excels at creating a sense of atmospheric dread. The renovated house on crumbling cliffs serves as both setting and metaphor—a beautiful facade constructed on an unstable foundation, much like the friends’ relationships and carefully curated lives. The author weaves the geological instability of the coast into the narrative with skill:
“The rain falls heavy and hard and often. It hits the salt surface of the sea, the broken shells and gleaming shingle of the beach. Further up, it sinks into the soil, filters into the Cretaceous chalk and broken rocks beneath, filling them like a sponge.”
The weekend unfolds against worsening weather, matching the escalating tensions. A night hike along “The Pirate’s Path,” skeet shooting in the garden, and a final dinner in a lighthouse—each social activity becomes increasingly fraught as secrets surface and alliances shift. The literal collapse of the cliff in the novel’s climax feels both shocking and inevitable, nature’s judgment on human hubris.
Character Development: Uneven Ground
Where the novel occasionally stumbles is in balancing its large cast. While Aline emerges as a compelling antagonist—charismatic, calculating, and capable of justifying her moral failings—some characters remain frustratingly underdeveloped. Brandon and Michael often feel more like satellites in Aline’s orbit than fully realized individuals with agency. Rob’s womanizing feels like a character shorthand rather than a developed trait.
Sienna is more successfully drawn, her guilt and fear palpable, though her motivations sometimes feel muddled. The peripheral characters of Nikki (Michael’s wife) and Cass (Rob’s girlfriend) primarily serve as foils to highlight the exclusionary dynamics of the core group.
The novel’s most successful character development comes through Milly, whose evolution from victim to avenger to something more complex forms the novel’s moral center. Her sections provide the emotional weight that grounds the more sensational elements of the plot.
Strengths and Weaknesses
What Works Well
- Setting as character: The Jurassic Coast isn’t merely backdrop but an active element in the unfolding drama
- Structural craft: The dual timeline and multiple perspectives create a compelling puzzle
- Thematic depth: Explorations of guilt, complicity, and self-deception elevate the narrative
- Atmospheric tension: North excels at building unease through environmental details
- Moral complexity: The novel avoids simplistic judgments, presenting characters whose actions fall in morally gray areas
Where It Falls Short
- Pacing issues: The novel takes time to find its rhythm, with early sections feeling somewhat meandering
- Character imbalance: Some key players receive less depth than their roles in the plot warrant
- Dialogue occasionally feels functional: Conversations sometimes serve plot advancement at the expense of naturalness
- Predictable elements: While the climax delivers, some reveals follow conventional thriller patterns
- Overreliance on coincidence: Some plot developments strain credulity, particularly Milly’s infiltration of Aline’s household
Thematic Resonance: The Price of Silence
North’s exploration of moral compromise and the corrosive power of secrets gives “The Weekend Guests” its thematic weight. The novel asks: How far would you go to protect a life you’ve built on deception? At what point does self-preservation become cruelty?
The characters’ varying responses to their shared crime reveal their moral cores. Brandon’s growing discomfort, Sienna’s crippling guilt, Rob’s compartmentalization, Michael’s weakness, and Aline’s ruthless pragmatism represent a spectrum of human responses to complicity. That these five onetime friends took different paths from the same starting point makes their reunion all the more explosive.
Particularly effective is North’s examination of privilege—how wealth and social status shield some from consequences that would destroy others. Aline’s certainty that she can control any situation, even one involving a shotgun, stems from a lifetime of smoothing over problems with money and connections.
Comparative Context
“The Weekend Guests” fits comfortably alongside other British psychological thrillers exploring the corrosive effects of long-held secrets, such as Lucy Foley’s “The Guest List” and Ruth Ware’s “One Perfect Couple.” North’s use of a dual timeline narrative recalls Sarah Pinborough’s “Behind Her Eyes,” while her exploration of moral compromise among friends brings to mind Tana French’s “The Secret Place.”
What distinguishes North’s work is her integration of setting as an active element in the plot and her interest in how past actions ripple through generations. The novel’s greatest strength may be how it connects a moment of youthful thoughtlessness to far-reaching consequences that extend beyond the original participants.
Final Assessment
“The Weekend Guests” is an atmospherically rich psychological thriller that doesn’t quite reach the heights it aspires to but delivers a satisfying reading experience nonetheless. North’s eloquent prose and structural craft elevate what could have been a conventional reunion-gone-wrong narrative into something more thoughtful and unsettling.
The novel’s exploration of guilt, complicity, and the limits of friendship resonates beyond its final page. Its greatest success lies in making readers question what they might do in similar circumstances—how far they would go to protect themselves, and at what cost to others.
- Strengths: Atmospheric setting, intricate structure, thematic depth
- Weaknesses: Uneven character development, occasional pacing issues, some plot conveniences
“The Weekend Guests” demonstrates Liza North’s growing skill as a writer of psychological suspense. While not without flaws, it marks her as an author to watch in the British crime fiction landscape, particularly for readers who appreciate moral complexity and atmospheric tension in their thrillers. North’s ability to weave geological and psychological instability together creates a uniquely haunting reading experience that lingers long after the last page.
For fans of Lucy Foley, Ruth Ware, and Sarah Pinborough, “The Weekend Guests” offers a similar blend of interpersonal tension and slow-burning suspense, with an added layer of geological metaphor that gives the novel its distinctive voice.
