Weddings

It’s wedding season! And what better way to celebrate love than with a mystery.

Discussed and mentioned

In a Dark, Dark Wood (2015) Ruth Ware

“A Deadly Wedding Day” in The Miss Marple Collection: New Tales of Jane Marple (2022) Dreda Say Mitchell

The Plus One (2024) S.C. Lalli

The Last Suppers (1995) Diane Mott Davidson

Engaged in Death (2016) Stephanie Blackmoore

The Guest List (2020) Lucy Foley

The Unwedding (2024) Ally Condie

Wedding Cake Murder (2016) Joanne Fluke

Something in the Water (2018) Catherine Steadman

Marriage, Monsters-in-Law, and Murder (2016) Sara Rosett

Death at an English Wedding (2017) Sara Rosett

No One Was Supposed To Die At This Wedding (2025) Catherine Mack

The Perfect Couple (2024) Netflix

The Last One at the Wedding (2024) Jason Rekulak

Other episodes you might like

What Would You Do: Something in the Water (released June 18, 2024)

Historical Mystery with Sara Rosett (released September 20, 2022)

What Would You Do: Please Join Us (released February 18, 2025)

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Transcript

This transcript is generated by a computer and there may be some mis-spellings and strange punctuation. We try to catch these before posting, but some things slip through.

Sarah	Welcome to Clued in Mystery. I’m Sarah.
Brook	And I’m Brook, and we both love mystery.
Sarah	Hi, Brook.
Brook	Hi, Sarah. Well, we are entering what’s commonly referred to as the wedding season, and that got us thinking about weddings and mysteries.
Sarah	Exactly. I don’t know about you, Brook, but I love a wedding. The flowers, the dresses, the music, the cake, and of course, the mystery. Because weddings are as much a time to celebrate the new life that a couple is embarking on as they are an excellent setup for a mystery.
Sarah	Old wounds are revisited, tensions are high, and guests often travel out of familiar surroundings. Will everyone survive before the couple says I do? Let’s get ready for murder and mayhem that comes with walking down the aisle.
Brook	Thank you, Sarah. This is going to be such a fun topic. And I think like from the outside looking in, it’s not an obvious connection. But when you really start thinking, just like your intro said about all the components that are there, it’s really ah ripe for the picking for a mystery.
Sarah	So I thought, Brook, we could talk about some of the books that we’ve read or are familiar with that have weddings as the theme. And I am going to start with The Bachelorette Party.
Sarah	So leading up to the big day. And the first one on my list that I wanted to talk about is In a Dark, Dark Wood, which is a 2015 book by Ruth Ware.
Sarah	And I’m certain that you’ve read this as well.
Brook	Yes, I have. it’s t’s on my list of books that came to mind in thinking about weddings.
Sarah	And so in this one, the main character is invited to the bachelorette party of someone who she’s lost contact with this person.
Sarah	So she’s not really sure why she’s been invited, but she goes anyway because she’s curious and almost immediately realizes that she’s made a mistake.
Sarah	And, ah you know, they’re in this remote cabin and things do not go well.
Brook	That’s right. So this is, I loved too, that I had never been familiar with the term the hen party before, you know. Growing up in America, it was the bachelorette party, of course, but I love the hen party. And I told my friends, you know, we were all well past being married at that point, but like, this is what we need to call it from now on when our daughters get married.
Brook	Yeah. Um, and it’s a glass house, which also like, I think that there’s that metaphor because when you’re getting married, you are this like on display, right?
Brook	Everyone’s looking at the bridal party and the bride and the groom and their families. So anyway, I really liked that ah connection, but, um, yeah, so it’s a psychological thriller with this wedding at the center.
Brook	So I was thinking about whether or not the Golden Age authors kind of mined this ah topic. And I wasn’t really able to find anyone who we’re real familiar with or we’ve talked about on the show, Sarah.
Brook	um And even though Agatha Christie wrote a lot of plots that hinged on… people being married. For instance, if two people get married, the inheritance line changes. There are clues in her stories that involve marriage and wedding.
Brook	But, um, one example that I did find from the Agatha Christie company is from The Miss Marple Collection: New Tales of Jane Marple. And this is a short story by Dreda Say Mitchell.
Brook	It’s called “A Deadly Wedding Day”, and it involves Miss Marple attending. This is in the 1960s, and she attends an interracial wedding, and mystery unfolds. So um I think that that’s really fun that we have a Christie that also pulls in the wedding theme.
Sarah	Oh, I had that on my list as well, because I wondered the same thing, if there were any golden age stories that we could that we could point to. But I think weddings as a um mystery trope is a more modern convention.
Sarah	So I have a couple of books that I’ve read that are about the big day. um a lot of them are, you know, destination weddings. You’ve got people gathering a few days beforehand. And so that gives some opportunity for, um you know, rivalries to emerge and things to go wrong. ah So one of them is um The Plus One, which is a 2024 release by SC Lalli. And guests are gathered for a couple’s wedding at a luxury resort.
Sarah	It’s very wealthy people who are supposed to be getting married, but the bride and groom are found dead the day before the wedding. And the plus one is that she’s actually a journalist.
Sarah	um And so she investigates to figure out what happened because they’re, you know, they’re at this luxury resort and don’t have access to a lot of traditional police investigative techniques.
Brook	The bride and the groom.
Sarah	Yeah, it was ah it was a ah ah great book.
Brook	It sounds great. And what you said, like everybody convenes, like this puts them in proximity for more days than just like the one big day when they have a destination wedding. And I was thinking about, you know, even if you’re lucky enough to have a family who everyone gets along quite well, when you have this high-pressure family event. Uh, it does kind of change people’s dynamics, I think. And many times you might have exes or step-families coming together. So ah, that does ramp up the tension.
Brook	Well, my next mention is um from one of the very first authors that I actually read modern day cozies from, and this is Diane Mott Davidson.
Brook	And she has a, ah her character is a caterer. So this is a easy connection to weddings. Um, the character is Goldie Scholes.
Brook	And I actually think that Davidson has a few books where there’s weddings involved because it’s pretty obvious that Goldie is a caterer, but, um, particularly Last Suppers, which came out in 1995, Goldie is getting married. This is when this amateur sleuth actually marries the homicide detective and their rector is murdered. And so she has to solve this murder. And um I just really I liked it because it she could have made the wedding of her amateur sleuth be kind of a side story to another case. But I love that she incorporated the whole thing in into that book.
Sarah	Mm hmm. Yeah. I haven’t read it, but I found a series that features a wedding planner as the sleuth. And so this is a cozy mystery series by Stephanie Blackmoore.
Sarah	And the first book in that series is Engaged in Death. And all of the I think there’s ah five or six books in the series. All of them, their title is a play on something to do with a wedding.
Brook	Oh, I love that concept. I thought of that as we were planning about ah how handy it would be to have a wedding planner going to all these different venues as your amateur sleuth.
Sarah	It’s a really good excuse to have different characters um ah you know in your stories.
Brook	Mm-hmm.
Sarah	Although I think it would probably be bad for business if you were known to be the wedding planner that that was investigating murders at the weddings.
Brook	This is true.
Sarah	Um, another book that I thought of that features a destination wedding is The Guest List by Lucy Foley. And that was released in 2020. And again, ah the bride and groom and the wedding party and their families have all traveled to a remote location for this wedding.
Sarah	And again, things unfold and not everybody who goes there survives.
Brook	That’s right. That’s a great book. And um I like the fact that it’s easy and it I like the fact that with a wedding, it’s an easy excuse to go someplace remote because many times, especially if it’s a wealthy family, they want that privacy, right? So they want to be away from the the photographers or or maybe some news or whatever. But when you’re remote, then you’re also cut off from resources.
Sarah	Yeah, on ah on a similar theme, I read um The Unwedding, which is 2024 release by Ally Condie. This is a Reese’s Book Club pick, which sometimes they can be a bit controversial. I think people either um agree with Reese or where they don’t. They kind of wonder where what her decision making was in terms of um selecting that for her for her book club.
Sarah	But in this one, a woman is at Big Sur for what was supposed to be her anniversary getaway. But her and her husband have split up. So she’s there by herself.
Sarah	But there’s also a wedding going on. And um one of the bridal party, I think it might be the groom, ends up um being dead. She finds him.
Sarah	And then there’s a big storm. So again, they’re cut off.
Sarah	And she has to figure out what’s what’s gone on.
Brook	Perfect. That sounds really good. That sounds like a great setup, Sarah.
Brook	Well, Joanne Fluke is another big name in the cozy world. um Actually, her books have been adapted by Hallmark Mysteries into the Curious Caterer series.
Brook	And her 2016 release, Wedding Cake Murder, is a perfect example in this setting. And it’s, again, Hannah Swinson, the sleuth’s big day.
Brook	um But she has to solve a murder at a baking competition. So, this doesn’t happen actually at her wedding, but she’s preparing for her wedding. So, she’s going through all those emotions of making her own plans and lots of decisions. And then she has a mystery to solve on the side.
Sarah	What a way to add stress to an already stressful time in your life to have to investigate a murder as well as get the seating charts arranged.
Brook	Absolutely. Do you remember how stressed out you were the week before? Did you want to have to solve a murder?
Sarah	No, I don’t think I would have liked to also be solving a murder as well as planning my wedding.
Sarah	Well, so after the big day, the couple goes on the honeymoon and that is also a great setup for, uh, for a mystery. Because again, we’re going to, you know often a remote location.
Sarah	So the first one that popped in my mind, Brook, was Something in the Water by Catherine Steadman, which we read as one of our What Would You Do books.
Sarah	And this was released in 2018. And so a in it, the main character in her husband find this bag of money ah when they’re on a um ah dive trip as part of their luxury, honeymoon.
Sarah	And, uh, and then the book, you know, gets into some detail about what they decide to do about having found this.
Brook	I loved that book. That was such a great read and a really fun conversation. Yeah, that that came to my mind too when I was thinking about honeymoons. That was the first book that came. So obviously it’s one that stuck with me.
Brook	I just had a couple more books I wanted to mention because this is from a past guest, Sara Rosett joined us to talk about historical mystery, and she writes several different series, and she’s got weddings in at least two of them. She’s got Marriage, Monsters-in-Law, and Murder from 2016, and this is about meddling in-laws.
Brook	And then she’s got, in 2017, Death at an English Wedding, and this is from her historical series, um A Beautiful Countryside Wedding, is the backdrop. for a high society who done it.
Sarah	Well, and I thought I would mention a book that’s coming out this year. No One Was Supposed To Die At This Wedding, which is the second book in a series by Catherine Mack. And Catherine Mack is the pen name of Catherine McKenzie, who is one of our What Would You Do authors and also an upcoming guest on the show.
Brook	Fantastic.
Sarah	Brook, I know you watched The Perfect Couple on Netflix and that centers around a wedding. Everybody has come to the family home of a wealthy um groom and the maid of honor is found dead.
Brook	Mm-hmm. That was a really great, definitely bingeable Netflix production um because it’s not a ah bunch of series of it’s not a whole bunch of episodes. I’m thinking like maybe six, but it was really good. Everyone is a suspect. Like you have that feeling in this show.
Brook	um And like you said, it’s very posh. These people are very wealthy. And so the setting and the grounds of their house is just like gorgeous. And I think that that’s one thing about why the wedding setup works really well is that what things appear versus what’s really going on. And that’s so important in a mystery, isn’t it? Where it looks one way, but yet something else is happening.
Brook	And nowhere else I think in our lives do we try to make things look picture perfect so much as when we’re setting up a wedding, you know, backdrops, color coordinated flowers, like everything is supposed to be perfect. And in these stories, so everything is clearly not.
Sarah	That’s a great point, Brook. It’s this day that we spend a lot of time focusing on making sure that, as you say, just ah appears perfect. And if there’s cracks underneath, they get exposed.
Brook	Definitely.
Brook	You know, Sarah, this whole week, as I’m thinking about weddings and some of these books that we’ve read that revolve around them, I’ve started to think of some scenarios. Like, because there’s a photographer on scene, it’s very likely that perhaps they snapped a picture that has something important in the background.
Brook	And, you know, you also have people who are experts in other ways, florists, pastors, um bakers. So like they could perhaps help the sleuth in various ways, solve the crime. And I just so got to thinking that some of these scenarios might show up in something that you and I write together someday.
Sarah	Definitely Brook. I think that, that it, as you say, it’s a great setup and weddings are, you know, because you’re bringing friends and family together and it might be one of the only times in your life where you have people from a whole variety of backgrounds together. You’ve got these different people who might not otherwise cross paths, but who might be excellent resources in solving the crime.
Brook	That’s right. That’s right. And I think that um something we’ve talked about in other stories before happens at a wedding. And like you just mentioned, you have all the different players from your family that come together. And I love it in a story where you realize that people are connected and you didn’t know they were before.
Brook	Happens a lot in domestic thrillers, psychological thrillers. And it’s just a great excuse for those people to come together.
Sarah	Mmhmm. Well, I thought, Brook, we should mention The Last One At The Wedding, which is a 2024 release. And in that, the daughter of a UPS driver is marrying the son of a wealthy businessman at the family’s summer resort.
Sarah	And I wanted to mention that because that is going to be our What Would You Do book this season.
Brook	Yes. So everyone, you have time to grab yourself a copy of that and read it because as you know, in What Would You Do episodes, we really break down the plot. So it’s um filled with spoilers. So this gives you time to get caught up and be able to enjoy that episode with us during wedding season.
Sarah	Okay. Well, thanks, Brook. This has been so fun to talk a little bit about weddings and mystery. And I hope that if you’re attending any weddings this summer, they do not involve any murders.
Brook	Thank you, Sarah. That is much appreciated. And we hope the same for you listeners. But for today, thank you for joining us on Clued in Mystery. I’m Brook.
Sarah	And I’m Sarah, and we both love mystery.