Review: THE SUMMER PARTY, Rebecca Heath

• 
  This edition made available by my local library as an e-book on Libby
  
• Published     05 Jan 2023
• Format     Ebook (Epub & Mobi)
• Extent     416 pages
• ISBN     9781804540978
• Imprint     Head of Zeus -- an Aries Book
• Publisher     Bloomsbury Publishing

Synopsis (publisher)

Perfect families are only as perfect as their best kept secrets.

Summer, 2000
The Whitlam siblings have it all and sixteen-year-old Lucy only wants one thing – to be close to them. Soon she's lazing around their impossibly large pool, wearing Annabel's expensive clothes and having secret rendezvous with Harry, until at their lavish clifftop party she sees something that could jeopardise it all.

Winter, 2020
One failed marriage later, Lucy is back in town and quickly lured back into the Whitlam's shiny world. But when a body washes up on the beach and someone seems determined to frame her for murder keeping their secrets this time could cost her everything.

Now that summer is over is she with them or against them? 

My Take

Lucy came to stay with her grandmother for the summer when she was 16. The Whitlams lived in the white mansion on the hill in a rural town on the Yorke Peninsular in South Australia.  Lucy's grandmother's cottage was next door. Alongside the three Whitlam siblings Lucy was an unsophisticated teenager and she idolised them. Lucy's grandmother worked as a cleaner for the Whitlam family and she warned Lucy not to get too friendly with them.

At the end of the summer, on the last night Lucy was there, the mother, Brooke Whitlam, left home forever and Lucy witnessed something without really realising what she had seen.

Twenty years later Lucy's grandmother has died and Lucy comes back to clear out the cottage. A foot is washed up under the jetty on the Whitlam's property, and it is identified as Brooke's. Lucy renews her "friendship" with the Whitlam siblings, their father, and the local policeman.

This is Rebecca Heath's debut novel, and though her later novel THE DINNER PARTY is much better, THE SUMMER PARTY is very readable and the plot is well constructed. 

My rating: 4.5

I've also read

5.0. THE DINNER PARTY