I received this book for free (hey, thanks!) in exchange for an honest review. I promise that this does NOT affect my opinion of the book or the content of my review. For real.
A Proposal to Die For by Molly Harper Genres: Adult, Mystery/Thriller
Published by Penguin Group on April 8, 2025
Format: eARC (352 pages) • Source: Publisher
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A fast-paced, witty, and delightful new mystery about a marriage proposal planner whose biggest job yet is threatened by a dead body (or two).
Jessamine Bricker loves a plan. Contingency plans and pros-and-cons lists are her love language, and because of that, her proposal planning business is thriving. But with rent costs rising at her office building, Jess jumps at the chance to plan a proposal between her snobby high school classmate, Diana, and her very wealthy boyfriend, Trenton Tillard…the Fourth.
Roped into joining Diana’s ”pre-bridal” retreat at the exclusive Golden Ash resort, Jess hopes to fade into the background, get some work done, and maybe find some time to unwind. Their first day is anything but relaxing: Diana is furious about the mountain spa’s lack of cell phone reception, the couple next door argues constantly, and Jess swears she just saw a drug deal go down. To top it all off, she’s warned to stay out of the woods by the gruff and sexy chef, Dean Osbourne. Is this a retreat or a horror movie?
As Jess tries to do her job while placating the bride-to-be and her increasingly over-the-top demands, she spends more and more time with the resort owners, finding herself much more in tune with the laid-back Osbourne family than her social climbing “boss.” Between a meditation garden-related drowning and Jess’s discovery of a body in a sauna, it's clear that deadly secrets abound at the Golden Ash. Now it’s up to Jess to unravel the mysteries here in the mountains—before all her plans are cancelled…permanently.
I requested this book on a whim to try to get into other mystery authors – it seemed cozy and I loved the premise of a proposal planner going to a fancy spa/resort. Unfortunately this book didn’t really work for me!
Jess used to be a wedding planner but after some drama and burnout, she decides to create a new venture in the proposal planning space. She links up with rich dudes who want to spend money on an over-the-top proposal and Jess handles all the logistics. When a frenemy from high school wants to redo her fiance’s proposal, she insists Jess help them and he’ll pay anything to make it happen. Jess needs the money and agrees – they head to a resort to work on the planning… and a dead body or two make an appearance.
My biggest issue with this book is that it felt very disjointed – the way the characters interacted with each other and the scenes progressed felt so weird and underdeveloped. It’s very hard to explain but I was glad to see from other reviews that I wasn’t alone in feeling this way. The plot wasn’t the issue but the way the author wrote the dialogue, character relationships, and overall scene structure was just very hard to read and sometimes confusing.
The romance was the most underdeveloped part; I didn’t believe any of it or see any progression for them throughout the book. All of a sudden they were kissing after a few weird interactions. The fact that Jess fell in with the resort owners (family/sibling group) was nice in theory because she was there working (not for leisure), but I didn’t feel the connections.
I was going to put this one aside but the drama picked up a little bit in the final stretch to make me just finish it off. I thought the ending was pretty predictable and obvious (in terms of the whodunnit). There were multiple mysteries and the one ~from the past~ involving the family was a bit of a random distraction, while I guess I understood why it was in there kind of?
Overall, this was a miss for me unfortunately!
The Missing Half by Ashley Flowers Genres: Adult, Mystery/Thriller
Published by Random House on May 6, 2025
Also by this author: All Good People Here
Format: Audio/Physical (400 pages) • Source: Purchased, Spotify Audiobooks
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Two women haunted by their sisters’ unsolved disappearances band together in this captivating mystery from the #1 New York Times bestselling author of All Good People Here and host of the #1 true crime podcast Crime Junkie.
“Sharp, slick, and chilling, with a whiplash ending you’ll never see coming.”—Jeneva Rose, author of Home Is Where the Bodies Are
Nicole “Nic” Monroe is in a rut. At twenty-four, she lives alone in a dinky apartment in her hometown of Mishawaka, Indiana, she’s just gotten a DWI, and she works the same dead-end job she’s been working since high school, a job she only has because her boss is a family friend and feels sorry for her. Everyone has felt sorry for her for the last seven years—since the day her older sister, Kasey, vanished without a trace.
On the night Kasey went missing, her car was found over a hundred miles from home. The driver’s door was open and her purse was untouched in the seat next to it. The only real clue in her disappearance was Jules Connor, another young woman from the same area who disappeared in the same way, two weeks earlier. But with so little for the police to go on, both cases eventually went cold.
Nic wants nothing more than to move on from her sister’s disappearance and the state it’s left her in. But then one day, Jules’s sister, Jenna Connor, walks into Nic’s life and offers her something she hasn’t felt in a long time: hope. What follows is a gripping tale of two sisters who will do anything to find their missing halves, even if it means destroying everything they’ve ever known.
I’ve always been a fan of Ashley Flowers and her podcast network so her first two novels have been highly anticipated reads for me. I enjoyed her debut enough (despite that infuriating, crazy ending) and was even more excited for her sophomore novel as a result. The other big reason is that I’m a sucker for missing person stories and unsolved mysteries – from a true crime perspective, I don’t listen to ones about solved cases or serial killers. I just think sharing unsolved stories can help spur action and help them get solved.
In any case, I was really not able to put this down! The story follows two women who each had their sister go missing from the same general area within a few weeks of each other. Nic, the main character, is contacted by Jenna to team up and figure out what happened to them years later. They start asking questions, comparing stories, and researching potential suspects in the area together.
For some reason the writing was a little hard to settle into at first – lots of commas and interestingly structured sentences – but I definitely got over that quickly. Like I said, I really didn’t put this down – I read 80% of the book in one sitting on a nice weekend afternoon.
The biggest thing I’ve learned from her two books is that Ashley is not afraid to GO THERE with her endings. I won’t spoil this one and it’s not even the same kind of ending as the last one (so don’t worry about a spoiler there either). She just has a lot of cajones!!
It’s not a perfect book, but I really enjoyed all of the twists. I didn’t try to spend a lot of time figuring it out and was therefore surprised by the reveals but maybe savvy mystery readers figured it all out – I’ll have to read some other reviews and find out. All in all, I will be anxiously awaiting her next book. This was a tight mystery (and very short!) and even better than her debut.
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