A few weeks ago I found myself stranded in Digby, Nova Scotia without a book. My friends Gina and John and I had booked a day-cruise from Saint John to Digby, a crossing which takes about two hours each way. We walked on (so no car) and our intention was, once on the other side, to walk into Digby (about an hour) have a poke around, have some lunch and then make our way back for the return voyage. Except, they cancelled the return voyage stranding us in Digby for the night.

Digby is a nice little spot, but there’s not really a lot to do there. There also weren’t really a lot of options for places to stay. We ended up in a motel, which wasn’t half bad. The nearest bookstore was about a seven hour walk, so I was on the hunt for something to read. Luckily, Sobey’s had a rack of paperbacks. That’s where I got Amy Stuart’s novel A Death at the Party.

Needs must.

Nadine Walsh is hosting her mother’s, celebrated author Marilyn Millay, 60th birthday party. There’s lots to be done, but it’s also an emotional day because exactly 30 years ago Marilyn’s younger sister, Colleen, was found dead in the barn. Well, actually, it was Nadine who discovered her. Nadine thinks it’s important to honour her aunt; Marilyn has more of “it’s in the past” take.

This complicates an event that is complicated for lots of other reasons and that’s one of the problems I had with this book. There’s just too much going on. There’s the fact that Nadine has cheated on her too-good-to-be-true husband, Paul, with one of his friends and colleagues, Zachery, who has since married and fathered a child with a young wife. Then there’s Isobel, Nadine’s teenaged daughter, who is is a state because her bestie, River, is in a coma and Nadine thinks that River’s father, Seymour, (another one of Paul’s friends) isn’t making nearly enough of the fact that his daughter is in the hospital. Then there’s her teenaged son, Damien, who is in a tricky relationship with the daughter of the guy who owns the corner store with whom Nadine has a “special” friendship because he knows she smokes. And then there’s her niece, Margot, who lives with them and what in the world would Nadine do without her?

So many characters; so much drama; so many strands. And I cared not one bit for any of it. Nadine was immensely unlikable and although the action of the party takes place in one day (beginning at the end with the death and then going back to the start of the day to fill readers in on how/why this death happened) it is the longest, most interminable day ever.

Not for me. Too bad, too, because I liked Stuarts’s book Still Mine.