Thoughts on : Please Join Us by Catherine McKenzie
Please Join Us by Catherine McKenzie
Genre : Thriller
Stand alone
About the Book :
At thirty-nine, Nicole Mueller’s life is on the rocks. Her once brilliant law career is falling apart. She and her husband, Dan, are soon to be forced out of the apartment they love. After a warning from her firm’s senior partners, she receives an invitation from an exclusive women’s networking group, Panthera Leo. Membership is anonymous, but every member is a successful professional. Nicole signs up for their retreat in Colorado.
Once there, she meets the other women who will make up her Pride. A CEO, an actress, a finance whiz, a congresswoman: Nicole can’t believe her luck. The founders of Panthera Leo are equally as impressive.
Nicole is all in. And when she gets home, she soon sees dividends. Her new network quickly provides her with clients that help her relaunch her career, and a great new apartment too. The favors she has to provide in return seem benign. But then she’s called to the congresswoman’s apartment late at night where she’s pressed into helping her cover up a crime. Can Nicole extricate herself from the group before it’s too late? Or will joining Panthera Leo be the biggest mistake of her life?
I’ve enjoyed several books by Catherine McKenzie before; I loved I’ll Never Tell, which I reviewed here, and thought You Can’t Catch Me was a good thriller too. So I was eager to read her new one, and was very thankful for the opportunity to read it through Netgalley.
Please Join Us has an interesting premise : a strange networking group, a retreat in a remote location with no access to communication with the outside world, a intriguing set of characters. I will say, Catherine McKenzie knows how to write a page turner! Through the story, we get snippets of “now”, and I was always eager to go back to the “before” to discover what happened in between.
That being said though, I thought there was something a bit off with the pacing. It took a while for the tension to really build. There were strange goings-on, yes, but a lot of it just made me feel more baffled than anything else. In parts, Nicole’s reactions confused me. She did question the group some, but she was easily deterred from finding out more. It was hard, then, to take her seriously as a lawyer too.
I really liked how everything tied up together in the end though. The last third of the book was definitely the most satisfying for me. You could tell the author had put a lot of thought into building her story, and it was much less straightforward than I had expected (without being overly complicated).
All in all, I enjoyed this one. Not my favourite from the author, but still one I would recommand to readers looking for a good thriller with a slightly different premise.
So glad you enjoyed this overall.