You're Invited

August 29, 2022
Thriller Award winner Jayatissa follows her debut, My Sweet Girl, with a twisty thriller set among the wealthiest circles of Sri Lanka. Amaya Bloom, a near-friendless young Sri Lankan woman living in Los Angeles, torments herself by cutting her skin, having masochistic sex with a man she barely knows, and watching her beautiful, affluent ex-best friend, Kaavi Fonseka, rise to influencer status on Instagram. When Amaya receives an invitation to Kaavi’s wedding, where she will marry Amaya’s handsome, successful ex-boyfriend, Amaya is determined to stop it at any cost. Amaya flies to Sri Lanka with plans to obtain an untraceable gun. However, on the night before the ceremony, Kaavi vanishes, and interviews with the wedding guests unearth an abundance of motives and suspects, culminating in a harrowing, unforeseeable ending. While the perpetrators are powerfully drawn and the social and political tensions in Sri Lanka sensitively suggested, some readers may feel frustrated by Amaya’s coy and often misleading hints about her past and her sudden shift late in the story to psychological health and benevolence. Ruth Ware fans will want to check this out. Agent: Melissa Danaczko, Stuart Krichevsky Literary. (Aug.)Correction: An earlier version of this review incorrectly stated the author had won an Edgar Award.