Plus One

Description

He’s at the wedding. He’s at the funeral. He’s at the retirement party laughing at the right jokes, and nobody can say who invited him. A few days later, one guest from the event is dead, with a little souvenir from the night tucked somewhere on the body.

Every gathering has that person — the one everybody assumes belongs to someone else. Event planner Dolores Achebe runs the nicest venues in the county and prides herself on knowing every face on every list. So it unsettles her when the deaths start lining up with her calendar: a bridesmaid, a pallbearer, a man who’d just been toasted for forty years of service, each one fine at the party and gone within the week, each one found with a matchbook or a favor or a folded program from the very event Dolores worked.

The killer doesn’t crash. He blends, perfectly, the kind of pleasant nobody nobody questions. He shakes hands. He signs the guestbook in a fake name. And he picks one person per celebration to follow home. Dolores starts cross-referencing her own bookings against the obituaries and finds the overlap is total — which means he’s been a guest at every event she’s ever run, which means he’ll be at the next one. She doesn’t cancel it. She prints an extra place card and waits to see who claims it.

A psychological thriller about the stranger in plain sight, this one poisons the warmest rooms — weddings, wakes, the gatherings where we let our guard all the way down. The dread is the smile across the buffet. You’ve met him. You just can’t place him.

Sign the guestbook. He already has.