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• The Last Book Party - 2019 Henry Holt and Company, New York, NY
• Welcome to Murder Week - 2025 Gallery Books, New York, NY

• - https://karendukess.com/

  Karen Dukess is the USAToday bestselling author of Welcome to Murder Week and The Last Book Party and is a contributor to the upcoming anthology (November 2025) Ladies in Waiting: Jane Austen’s Unsung Characters. She is also the host of The Castle Hill Author Talks, a series of virtual and in-person interviews with some of today’s most exciting authors. Karen has been a tour guide in the former Soviet Union, a newspaper reporter in Florida, a magazine publisher in Russia and a speechwriter on gender equality for the United Nations. She has a degree in Russian Studies from Brown University and a Master’s in Journalism from Columbia University. She lives with her family near New York City and spends as much time as possible in Truro on Cape Cod.

• Tess Callahan - https://tesscallahan.substack.com/p/karen-dukess?r=dkqj7&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&triedRedirect=true

  Karen Dukess on Writing with Freedom and Delight
  Dukess nurtures her flow state through playful curiosity and a swim in the pond.
  Tess Callahan
  Nov 26, 2024

  Hello, friends!

  With great delight I welcome to Writers at the Well Karen Dukess. Karen is the author of The Last Book Party (Henry Holt 2019), which was an IndieNext and Discover New Writers pick. Her new novel, Welcome to Murder Week, will be published in Summer 2025 by Scout Press, an imprint of Simon and Schuster. Karen is the host of The Castle Hill Author Talks, a series of virtual and in-person interviews with some of today’s most exciting authors. Her Substack, “Keep Calm and Carry On,” is an entertaining resource for readers and writers. Karen has been a tour guide in the former Soviet Union, a newspaper reporter in Florida, a magazine publisher in Russia and, for nearly a decade, a speechwriter on gender equality for the United Nations. She has blogged on raising boys for The Huffington Post and written book reviews for USA Today. She has a degree in Russian Studies from Brown University and a Master’s in Journalism from Columbia University. She lives with her family near New York City and spends as much time as possible in Truro on Cape Cod.

  Karen Dukess
  In this interview, Karen shares her delight in the writing process, the art of “working hard without thinking hard,” and the fun (yes, fun) she had plotting her new novel. When stuck, she does not waste time staring at the page. Instead, she walks, cycles, or swims to the center of a pond where answers spontaneously float to the surface. In a welcome antithesis to “just open a vein,” Karen invites us to experience the joy of writing.

  Stay tuned for upcoming interviews with novelist Douglas Bauer, poet/essayist Kelle Groom, novelist/memoirist Laura Munson, novelist Brooke Lea Foster, Buddhist lama/nonfiction writer Cynthia Jurs, and novelist/short story writer Jill McCorkle. Previous posts include written interviews with essayist Sven Birkerts, poet/sculptor Don Freas, novelist JoeAnn Hart, a poem by Caprice Garvin, and podcast interviews with screenwriter/novelist Alan Watt, novelist Mar’ce Merrell, and thrutopian novelist Manda Scott.

  If you enjoy these interviews, please comment, share, subscribe, and suggest writers you’d like to see interviewed!

  Yours at the well,

  Tess

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  What was the seed image (visual, auditory, conceptual) that gave rise to your forthcoming novel Welcome to Murder Week?
  Though I wasn’t consciously aware of it until recently, the most consistent seed of my novels has been a particular place. With The Last Book Party, it was Truro on Cape Cod, where I’ve spent all my summers, and with my second novel, which is unpublished, it was Russia, where I lived for six years in the 1990s. So, I wasn’t particularly surprised when a trip to the Peak District in England sparked the idea for my latest novel. I was not only taken with the beauty of the English countryside, but once there, I felt like I’d stepped into the pages of some of my favorite novels and films. It got me thinking about how much our experience of a place is affected by our pre-conceptions about that place, whether real or fictional. It put me in a delightfully free mood, poking fun at myself and my notions of England. While still there, I wrote some Facebook posts about my experience and in doing so discovered the playful tone that I’d carry through my next novel, which is about Americans on a “solve a fake murder mystery” vacation in the English countryside. Ultimately, the seeds of this novel were the place and the tone that was inspired by the place.

  How do you access your well? Do you meditate? Walk in nature? Stare out windows?
  To access my well of ideas, I either have to be writing loosely and freely, in a real state of flow, or I have to be outside and in motion, usually walking or cycling or swimming, and letting my mind wander. The one thing that I know will not work is trying to come up with an idea. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve sat at my computer, laboring over a problem and being completely frustrated and ready to throw in the towel. I’ll take a break and, if I’m in Cape Cod, will go for a swim, and at some point when I’m in the middle of the pond, the ideas will sort themselves out. By the end of the swim, my novel will not seem like such a mess. Obviously, it’s all a matter of perspective, but it does feel magical the way my writing improves while I’m swimming. Writing requires a difficult balance – you have to work hard, but not necessarily think too hard. You have to let the subconscious come into play and trust that it knows what it’s doing.

  Traditionally wells were gathering places and points of connection between members of a community. What role have friendships, programs, teaching, studying, writing and/or reading groups played in your development as a writer?
  I love this idea as a connection among writers being a well because being part of a writing group has been the single most helpful thing for my fiction. I never would have written a novel, let alone three, without my writing group. It not only gave me accountability, in that I had to show up with new pages, but it helped me see that the process is arduous for everyone, that self-doubt is part of the process and that, perhaps most important, you can find your way without having a clear sense of where you’re going. The members of my group believed in me and they believed in the process being not linear and not always logical. Before publishing my first novel, the only writers I knew were the members of my writing group. Publishing a novel opened a whole new world to me. I’ve met so many writers and developed some very rich friendships, including with people with whom I share pages as well as the agony and the joys of writing and publishing. I can’t image doing this alone. Writing is so solitary and being able to share my love of books and reading with like-minded people has enriched my life beyond measure.

  What writers, past or present, have challenged and inspired you? If you like, you can talk about a particular book that has stayed with you and lives inside you.
  The book that lives most vividly inside me is Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte. It’s got so many things I love – a heroine who has yet to discover her strength, injustices to rail against, challenges to overcome, suspense, secrets, betrayal, repressed and then requited love, and of course a moody, broody setting. But what I think I love most about it, what has spoken to me since the first time I read it as an adolescent, is that it’s a woman’s quest and one that is about love, but not only about love. Each of my novels has a scene that’s dramatic, maybe even melodramatic, and involving the elements (wind, waves, darkness, trees) as my protagonist struggles to accept a truth and the emotions caused by that truth. I think those scenes are my attempt to mirror the feeling of reading Jane Eyre. I’m an eclectic reader and can appreciate a quiet book when in the right mood, but there’s a very innate part of me that’s drawn to heightened, earned emotion.

  Welcome to Murder Week is witty, wise, and deliciously escapist, with a fresh, inventive twist on the murder mystery. What inspired you to venture into mystery writing? What challenges and/or fun did you experience in exploring this genre?
  My initial idea was to write about a writing group that travels together to the English countryside. When I shared this with a friend who happens to be a literary agent (not mine), she said, “OK…but what are they going to do there?” And probably in part because of an ingenious little book, “Your Guide to Not Getting Murdered in a Quaint English Village,” I thought my characters could solve a murder mystery – but a fake mystery as I wasn’t interested in writing about a “real” fictional murder. I’d recently set aside my novel about Russia (pitching it a few months after Russia invaded Ukraine was the essence of bad timing) and I wanted to write something fun. So I decided my characters would participate in a “solve a fake murder mystery” week. I’ve always enjoyed mysteries, reading them and watching them on Masterpiece Theater and Britbox, but had never considered trying to write one. This was a totally new experience for me as I’d never plotted out a story in advance. And this part of my novel, the fake mystery and its solution, had to be plotted. And it was a lot of fun! I loved concocting the crime and planting clues and red herrings. It was probably the most fun I’ve ever had writing fiction. I read a lot of Golden Age detective novels while writing and enjoyed playing with those tropes in my own novel. Having to plot out this part of the novel allowed me to create a scaffolding for my story to hang on; it made it easier for me to let the rest of it develop organically. And what developed was another mystery, not fake, which turned out to be the heart of the novel. In the end, I got to plot a murder mystery and still have the gratifying experience of discovering what I was writing about while writing it.

  In Welcome to Murder Week, your protagonist experiences a budding sense of adventure. You have worked as a tour guide in the former Soviet Union, a newspaper reporter in Florida, a magazine publisher in Russia, and a speechwriter on gender equality for the United Nations. Can you speak to the roots of your own sense of adventure and how that is or isn’t now fulfilled as a novelist?
  I’ve never had a clear ambition other than my desire to be a writer, which I didn’t really take seriously until I was almost 50. I enjoyed my jobs in journalism and speechwriting, but I always had a sense that I needed to do something with my experiences, with all this great material I was developing by living my life.

  Fiction provides me with a vessel for holding what I have experienced and thought about. It allows me to make use of my life in a way that is very gratifying. There’s also a great sense of adventure in writing a novel – you put yourself in other lives, imagined situations, and really feel it.

  At this stage in my life, there are a lot of adventures I’m happy to experience fictionally. I don’t have to travel far; I’m traveling at my desk all the time. One of the things I loved about journalism was constantly having the opportunity to learn new things, research new areas, and ask questions, all of which are things that are part of writing fiction too. It’s a never-ending education.

  In your tender, beautiful debut novel, The Last Book Party, 25-year-old Eve Rosen wrestles with ambition, love, disillusionment, and finding her own voice. Although the genres and storylines are very different, do you see any overlapping explorations between the two novels?
  Interesting question! On the surface, the two novels couldn’t be more different. One is about the coming-of-age of a young writer and the other is about a young woman on a fake murder quest who is simultaneously trying to solve a mystery about her late, estranged mother.

  But I think there are similarities in that each is about a young woman whose ambitions and happiness are hemmed in by a narrative about themselves that they believe to be true.

  To become a writer, Eve (in The Last Book Party) has to break out of the mold that her family has put her in and that she has internalized. And in doing this, she has to take risks that she has been protecting herself from. In Welcome to Murder Week, Cath has been living her life in opposition to her mother’s way of life. But when she discovers the truth about her mother’s life, she realizes that she’s been reacting to a version of her mother that isn’t even real. She is now free to live her life on her own terms.

  I’ve always been interested in how the narratives we tell ourselves about our own lives impact how we live and I can see now that I’ve written about that in both novels. I’ve heard it said that we tend to write the same story over and over again even if the trappings of the story, as in the plot, are different each time. And maybe that’s true!

• Shelf Awareness - https://www.shelf-awareness.com/max-issue.html?issue=596#m1236

  Tuesday April 29, 2025: Maximum Shelf: Welcome to Murder Week

  Karen Dukess: Secrets and Seeing

  Karen Dukess
  (photo: Nina Subin)
  Karen Dukess has been a tour guide in the former Soviet Union, a newspaper reporter in Florida, a magazine publisher in Russia and a speechwriter on gender equality for the United Nations. She is an alumna of Brown University and Columbia University and the author of The Last Book Party. Her second novel is Welcome to Murder Week, coming from Scout Press/Gallery on June 10, 2025.

  Tell us about the inspiration for Welcome to Murder Week.

  This book was born out of a trip I took to England with my sister in the fall of 2022. I had seen some photos, posted by an author I knew, of the Peak District--it was so beautiful, and looked just like my fantasy of the English countryside. My sister Laura and I have similar tastes in books and British culture, and we had never traveled together on our own, but we decided to do it. And it was a dream. People were very friendly, and we didn't see many other Americans. Especially after the pandemic, the Peak District doesn't get a lot of American visitors.

  We went to Bakewell in Derbyshire, and it was like stepping into all the novels I had loved for years--Jane Eyre, Rebecca, Agatha Christie's. I was seeing it all through the lens of fiction. We did tons of walking and going to pubs, drinking tea and visiting grand estates and walking the Jane Eyre trail. Every night I would post on Facebook about our adventures, and my posts reflected the giddy, silly mood I was in. It was just such a lark, and so fun.

  I had recently completed a novel set in Russia, where I lived for six years. But I was trying to sell it right after Russia invaded Ukraine, so it felt rather anachronistic. After my England trip, I had other ideas bubbling up--so I decided to write about Americans going to England and having the same kind of experiences I'd had. Having fun was my main motivation for writing; I wanted to enjoy it. I thought, I will amuse myself, and hopefully it will amuse other people. And it was the most fun I've ever had writing anything.

  The book pays tribute to Agatha Christie and Golden Age English mysteries, but it's a modern story. How does it fit into that mystery tradition and also offer something fresh?

  I'd never written a mystery before! I'm a mystery reader, but not a huge one--though I did read a lot of Golden Age crime while writing this book. (And I watched a lot of Midsomer Murders!) Having said that, I've always been drawn to stories that have mystery and secrets in them. We read those kinds of stories to find out what happened in the past. Withheld information is often what keeps us reading. There are so many stories that are not classified as mysteries, but they have mysteries in them. You're chasing a question: What's going on here? What explains this? During my research, I also discovered some contemporary mystery writers. Getting to know the genre better has been really fun.

  The book's plot centers on a fake murder mystery, but the characters don't always know who's involved (and/or who's telling the truth). How does the book explore the concept of truth vs. lies?

  I think that's interesting in so much of fiction: what a character says versus what they're actually thinking. Or: a character believes a certain narrative about their life and makes decisions according to that, and then they discover that that narrative is not necessarily true. Cath, my protagonist, has spent all this time rebelling against her mother's way of living, thinking she was flaky and flighty, but never knowing why her mother was that way. It has led Cath to live a narrower life--reacting against her mother, trying not to be like her mother. She's been burned by her mother but is also curious. And she learns some things throughout the book, but she never really figures out her mother, not completely. She has to find a way to move forward without knowing everything.

  It's also been a fun experience to talk about the fake murder. People then start to think it's not a "real" mystery--but it is a real mystery! It's just not a real murder. The true mystery involves Cath's story and her search for answers about her mother. When you read a traditional mystery novel, part of the joy is that you know the mystery will be solved. But Cath's story is a little more complicated.

  Cath is an optician, but she can't always see what's in front of her. How does the book play with themes of seeing and vision?

  I wanted Cath to have her own business, doing something she had done since she was young. It was inspired by an optician in the town I grew up in, a woman who had worked at an optician's shop since high school. She worked for this man for years and basically took over the business from him. And when it was quiet in the shop, she would always read. In Cath's case, she sometimes chooses not to see, or she insists on seeing her own version of things, which is not necessarily the truth. Mr. Groberg, her former boss, encourages her to travel, telling her that it can be like getting new glasses. It struck me as a perfect metaphor for a trip that will really change how Cath sees her mother, and ultimately herself.

  How is this novel similar to your first book, despite their very different settings?

  In some ways, my novels are very different from one another--my first book is a literary coming-of-age story set in the 1980s. But I think it's true that writers often write the same story again in different forms. My books are both about women who are basing their decisions on a narrative about the world, or about their family, that they've accepted, but which turns out not to be entirely true, or won't bring them happiness. They both learn something that makes them change their approach to life. In some ways, I'm always writing about the stories that we tell ourselves, and how confining those stories can be. Sometimes you need something that jolts you out of your story. Both my novels are about women making those discoveries. --Katie Noah Gibson, blogger at Cakes, Tea and Dreams

Byline: Pete Tosiello

The Last Book Party

By Karen Dukess

Henry Holt. 256 pp. $27

---

Forty pages into Karen Dukess' "The Last Book Party," a period piece set in the luxurious lap of 1980s publishing, a hotshot novelist lures an unsuspecting secretary from his publishing house to an unoccupied downtown apartment and clumsily attempts to seduce her. Leveraging his position of power and close professional relationship with the secretary's supervisor, he pressures her into drinking beer on what is ostensibly a work errand, then approaches her from behind and pulls her hair down. "Sorry - I couldn't resist," he waffles when she whips around in horror before fleeing the premises.

If this episode sounds like the setup to a salacious industry tell-all or rings of the workplace scandals involving Matt Lauer and Louis C.K., readers are doomed for a letdown. Not only is Dukess' would-be assaulter swiftly redeemed as a brooding love interest, but the pattern is repeated when Eve, the secretary and protagonist, takes another job and finds herself in a whirlwind affair with a presumptuous new boss 30 years her senior. For a novel concerned with class politics, marital infidelity and office predations, "The Last Book Party" is completely illiterate regarding the dynamics of power and privilege.

Eve's tour du Manhattan publishing is itself a bounty of inherited plenitude. A preternaturally dewy 25, she is a heroine to whom things - job offers, lusty flings, impossible coincidences - just happen. She stumbles upon strangers who promptly divulge compromising secrets; she falls in infatuated love at the drop of a hat. In one instance, she is bicycling down a quiet country lane daydreaming about a new crush when he quite literally jumps out of a row of hedges. Convinced of her destiny to become a great writer despite a nagging inability to sit down and write anything, she is a narrator blissfully exempt from conflict, neurosis and anxiety.

After being passed over for a promotion to which she feels entitled ("I am a very educated typist," she complains to one sympathetic listener), Eve gives notice at her publishing house and accepts a longstanding offer to work as an assistant for a New Yorker columnist near her family's summer home in Cape Cod. There are shades of the Cape scenes in Hanya Yanagihara's "A Little Life" and Liska Jacobs' "Catalina," but I am most reminded of Kurt Wenzel's "Lit Life," a boozy, vastly superior sendup which eulogized the late century's beachcombing literary hobnobbers even before the final stake had been driven in. But the politics of the Cape's seasonal "wash ashores" and their year-round neighbors in "The Last Book Party" are gratingly insensitive. Eve laments her well-to-do family's ordinariness, bemoaning their unpretentious taste and subdued cocktail parties. Her parents read the New Yorker, but critically, they do not write for it; an acquaintance of Eve's mother works for a rival magazine, but - gasp! - toils in the ad sales department.

The yuppies gentrifying Dukess' coastal New England - including Eve's own Ivy League-pedigreed family - are presented as vacuous strivers, somehow more ignominious than both the hardy locals who comprise the service industry and the old-money summer residents who sustain them. The seasonal literati grouse from their seaside saltboxes when a family-run grocer is supplanted by a shiny new supermarket. Eve, a Brown grad who spends her holidays jetting between Upper Manhattan and the Upper Cape, despairs that she will always be insufficiently cosmopolitan and lacks the connections needed to ascend professionally. Somewhere, Daisy Buchanan lifts a champagne flute in salutation.

Months after the near-assault in New York, Eve has inexplicably warmed up to her former firm's novelist, Jeremy, while simultaneously carrying on a lurid affair with her new employer, Henry, at the Cape. In the intervening months Jeremy has again plied her with alcohol and grabbed her hair uninvited, but no matter - his reclamation hinges on the tawdry revelation that he is the son of Holocaust survivors, which evidently gives him license to harass his publisher's secretaries. Henry, for his part, relishes Eve like a concubine while his wife writes poetry downstairs. Still, Eve is affronted by her mother's suggestion that she be Jeremy's "muse," incensed by the sexist implication even as multiple men take advantage of her within the charmed confines of a patriarchal summer community.

In a recent Popula essay, Maria Bustillos decried "Booksmart," a film about the subtle degrees of experience in an exclusive California suburb, as "a high-school movie for Biden voters." The designation doubly applies to "The Last Book Party," and not just because the male characters are so cheerily handsy around young women. It is a novel about millionaires which posits a basic meritocracy (at one point Eve reminds herself that a colleague "was no fool" given her resume as a Hamilton alumna) while inadvertently celebrating the spoils of privilege and institutional misogyny. Dukess' novel is a postcard from another era, blind to itself and the world, but the fatal mistake is the assumption that it would be anything but irritating in this one.

Early in the novel Eve discusses a paramour with an enchanted librarian straight out of "Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore" who winkingly advises, "You know what they say about judging a book by its cover." In "The Last Book Party," that logic perversely applies even to sexual predators.

---

Tosiello is a writer and critic based in New York.

Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2019 The Washington Post
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Tosiello, Pete. "Book World: Karen Dukess' 'The Last Book Party' is a postcard from another era." Washington Post, 10 July 2019. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A592827442/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=85feb48b. Accessed 17 Oct. 2025.

Dukess, Karen THE LAST BOOK PARTY Henry Holt (Adult Fiction) $27.00 7, 9 ISBN: 978-1-250-22547-4

A young woman with literary aspirations jumps at the chance to become a summer assistant for a prestigious author in Dukess' bittersweet coming-of-age debut novel.

It's June 1987, and Eve Rosen is star-struck as she walks up the driveway of the summer home of New Yorker writer Henry Grey, for the guests are "Truro's summer elite, the writers, editors, poets, and artists who left their apartments in Manhattan and Boston around Memorial Day and stayed on Cape Cod into September." An editorial secretary at Henry's New York publisher, Eve is thrilled to meet the man whose correspondence with her, however brief, is the highlight of her job. She is also dazzled by Henry's attractive son, Franny, and Henry's aloof wife, the poet Tillie Sanderson. With dreams of becoming a writer, yet lacking confidence, Eve longs to join this world, so very different from her Jewish parents' suburban, middle-class lifestyle. "I was buoyed by a sense of possibility. A tentative belief that I could have a creative life too." Returning to Manhattan, Eve meets her boss's new literary discovery, snobbish Jeremy Grand, who went to school with Franny. Jealous of Jeremy's connections with the Greys and his early success, Eve reads his unpublished novel and is stunned by the power of his voice. Her doubts about her own abilities grow, but when Eve is bypassed for a promotion, she quits her job and accepts Henry's offer to work as his research assistant for the summer. Her decision leads her to some hard (if somewhat predictable) truths that are exposed at the Greys' annual book costume party. Eve is an appealing protagonist, naive and yet assertive in trying to find her own voice as an artist.

Written with fresh confidence and verve, this first novel is a bibliophile's delight, with plenty of title-dropping and humorous digs at the publishing scene of the 1980s. The lyrical evocations of the Cape Cod landscape will also enchant readers seeking that perfect summer read.

Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2019 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
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"Dukess, Karen: THE LAST BOOK PARTY." Kirkus Reviews, 1 May 2019. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A583840590/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=620ef9b2. Accessed 17 Oct. 2025.

The Last Book Party

Karen Dukess. Holt, $27 (256p) ISBN 978-1-250-22547-4

Dukess's vivid debut travels back to the summer of 1987 when an aspiring writer lands a job as an assistant for a well-known writer. Eve Rosen is a secretary at Hodder, Strike and Perch, a publishing company. While staying in Truro, Mass., with her family during the summer, Eve is invited to a party at the home of writer Henry Grey, where she meets his carefree son, Franny, and the two engage in a brief affair. After realizing that her secretarial position is a career dead end, Eve takes Henry up on his offer of a research assistant position for the summer. Though she enjoys working for Henry, and he begins to value her opinion, their friendship changes into an affair they both understand will likely end once the summer is over. Henry and his wife, Tillie, meanwhile, continue to plan the their end-of-summer party where everyone dresses up as their favorite literary character. Eve's novelist friend Jeremy Grand comes for the party, but not all goes as planned, as Eve discovers some disturbing things about the origins of the plot of Jeremy's novel. Clever characterizations bolster this enticing coming-of-age story. (July)

Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2019 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
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"The Last Book Party." Publishers Weekly, vol. 266, no. 21, 27 May 2019, p. 60. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A587975187/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=46337097. Accessed 17 Oct. 2025.

* Dukess, Karen. Welcome to Murder Week. Gallery/Scout. Jun. 2025.304p. ISBN 9781668079775. $28.99. M

After Cath's estranged mother dies and Cath is going through her things, she finds a ticket for a murder-mystery week in England. Baffled but intrigued, she decides to go. All the residents in a Peak District town come together to stage a fake murder in hopes of attracting tourism. Cath eagerly teams up with her cottagemates--Wyatt, who works unhappily in his husband's birding shop, and Amity, a divorced romance writer who is hoping to gain inspiration for her next book. As they gather clues and interview suspects, Cath also learns shocking and potentially life-altering truths about her mother and has a fling with a handsome barman. By week's end, Cath, Wyatt, and Amity have forged firm friendships, solved a tricky crime, and smoothed out some serious wrinkles in their own lives. VERDICT This charming and heartfelt cozy from Dukess (The Last Book Party) is just the thing for a rainy afternoon and a cup of tea. The dialogue is snappy, the characters are endearing, and the plot is satisfyingly quirky--Susan Clifford Braun

Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2025 A wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
http://www.libraryjournal.com/
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Braun, Susan Clifford. "Dukess, Karen. Welcome to Murder Week." Library Journal, vol. 150, no. 3, Mar. 2025, p. 85. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A837611341/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=8a8f3f35. Accessed 17 Oct. 2025.

Welcome to Murder Week

Karen Dukes. Scout, $28.99 (304p)

ISBN 978-1-6680-7977-5

An unexpected ticket for a "murder week" in England's Peak District upends the quiet routine of optician Cath Little in this sturdy reworking of classic British country house mysteries from Dukes (The Last Book Party). When Cath's estranged mother dies, the Buffalo, N.Y., native discovers that she had purchased tickets to a weeklong British murder mystery party. Unable to cancel the trip, Cath decides to go. At the event she teams up with Wyatt Green, who's at a crossroads in his marriage, and Amity Clark, a divorced romance writer struggling with writer's block, to try and win the contest. In the process, she unearths previously unknown details about her mother's past, and falls for sexy bartender Dev Sharma, who's staffing the party. Mystery-first readers are likely to find the faux whodunit at the center of the plot perfunctory, and the revelations about Cath's mother lack punch. Still, the breezy atmosphere and Dukes's deep knowledge of mystery tropes generate a certain amount of fun. It's a solid if unspectacular pastiche. Agent: Doug Stewart, Sterling Lord Literistic. (June)

Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2025 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
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"Welcome to Murder Week." Publishers Weekly, vol. 272, no. 13, 31 Mar. 2025, p. 27. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A834331765/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=36ebd27f. Accessed 17 Oct. 2025.

Dukess, Karen WELCOME TO MURDER WEEK Scout Press/Simon & Schuster (Fiction None) $28.99 6, 10 ISBN: 9781668079775

A young woman travels to England after discovering tickets to a murder mystery week purchased by her estranged late mother.

Thirty-four-year-old Cath Little lives a quiet life in Buffalo, New York, inhabiting the Victorian house she inherited from the grandmother who raised her and running an optician business she acquired from her retired neighbor. It's been several months since a stroke killed 55-year-old Skye Sanders Little, and Cath is still reluctant to go through the boxes left to her. Having survived a lonely childhood that featured brief, intermittent visits from the itinerant Skye, Cath has mixed feelings as she finally tackles the remnants of her mother's possessions. But amid the unpaid bills and other detritus, Cath finds a receipt showing that her financially strapped mother paid for two tickets to "solve a 'genuine fake English-village murder mystery'" in the Peak District. Reluctant but curious, Cath is soon sharing a cozy cottage in the village of Willowthrop, teaming up with housemates Wyatt Green, who unhappily works in his husband's birding shop in New Jersey, and Amity Clark, a divorced romance writer from California. The trio's quest to solve the fake mystery also becomes an investigation of the real-life mystery of Cath's mother. What was her connection to Willowthrop? Along the way, Cath enjoys a romantic fling with a handsome maker of artisanal gin. Dukess follows up on her touching coming-of-age debut,The Last Book Party (2019), with a charming and funny homage to cozy mysteries. All the genre's tropes are here: the clever amateur sleuths, the quaint setting, "the vicar, the nosy neighbor, and the village doctor." But this is also a poignant, redemptive tale of a grief-stricken daughter reconciling her troubled past with her promising future.

An entertaining whodunit with a touch of heartwarming pathos.

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"Dukess, Karen: WELCOME TO MURDER WEEK." Kirkus Reviews, 1 May 2025. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A837325706/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=c370b814. Accessed 17 Oct. 2025.

Welcome to Murder Week. By Karen Dukess. June 2025. 304P. Scout, $28.99 (9781668079775); e-book (9781668079799).

When uber responsible optician Cath goes through her late mother's things, she's surprised to find a fully paid ticket for a weeklong murder mystery simulation in a picture-perfect town in England's Peak District. Cath has spent a lifetime avoiding her mostly absentee mother's flighty schemes, but she's intrigued enough to take the trip by herself. As she gamely immerses herself in solving the "murder" with help from her two housemates, she finds unexpected love in a gently charismatic village bar owner who specializes in creating artisanal gin as well as answers to her many questions about exactly why her often distant and uninvolved mother so meticulously planned this unlikely mother-daughter vacation in the first place. The murder mystery may be fake, but the decades-long secrets she uncovers about her family are real and ultimately life-changing. Combining mystery, romance, and coming-of-age story, Dukess' (The Last Book Party, 2019) second novel will engage readers with an inventive twist on the traditional murder mystery.--Jane Harper

Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2025 American Library Association
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Harper, Jane. "Welcome to Murder Week." Booklist, vol. 121, no. 17-18, May 2025, p. 61. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A852211727/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=bd3e4bbc. Accessed 17 Oct. 2025.

Tosiello, Pete. "Book World: Karen Dukess' 'The Last Book Party' is a postcard from another era." Washington Post, 10 July 2019. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A592827442/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=85feb48b. Accessed 17 Oct. 2025. "Dukess, Karen: THE LAST BOOK PARTY." Kirkus Reviews, 1 May 2019. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A583840590/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=620ef9b2. Accessed 17 Oct. 2025. "The Last Book Party." Publishers Weekly, vol. 266, no. 21, 27 May 2019, p. 60. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A587975187/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=46337097. Accessed 17 Oct. 2025. Braun, Susan Clifford. "Dukess, Karen. Welcome to Murder Week." Library Journal, vol. 150, no. 3, Mar. 2025, p. 85. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A837611341/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=8a8f3f35. Accessed 17 Oct. 2025. "Welcome to Murder Week." Publishers Weekly, vol. 272, no. 13, 31 Mar. 2025, p. 27. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A834331765/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=36ebd27f. Accessed 17 Oct. 2025. "Dukess, Karen: WELCOME TO MURDER WEEK." Kirkus Reviews, 1 May 2025. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A837325706/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=c370b814. Accessed 17 Oct. 2025. Harper, Jane. "Welcome to Murder Week." Booklist, vol. 121, no. 17-18, May 2025, p. 61. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A852211727/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=bd3e4bbc. Accessed 17 Oct. 2025.

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