Author: Alex Finlay
Rating: ★★★½☆ (3.5/5)
Format: Audiobook
Source: NetGalley
I received an advanced reader/listener copy of this book. All opinions are my own.
So here is a fun bit of irony (maybe?) to start with: I picked up The Anniversary because I saw it on NetGalley and thought, oh, I’ve read Alex Finlay before and liked him. Turns out I was wrong. I had not read this particular author… except then I went back to my StoryGraph and discovered that yes, actually, I HAD read his “If Something Happens to Me” back in 2023 and really liked it. So I was right for the wrong reasons, or wrong for the right reasons, and either way I came out the other side a fan.
The Anniversary follows Jules and Quinn, two people whose lives get permanently tangled together on May 1, 1992, the night Jules survives an attack by the elusive May Day Killer and Quinn lands in juvenile detention. The book then checks back in on them one day a year, every May 1st, over the following decade, as two mysteries inch toward the truth and the killer stays very much out there. That single-day-per-year structure could have felt gimmicky, but it worked. I never found it distracting or confusing.
My gut reaction when I finished was that I liked it. Then I let it sit a while, and I realized I liked it a lot more than I first thought. The twists are complicated and dark and good, and they’re the kind that land better once your brain has had time to chew on them. The darkness here is worth flagging though, because this one comes with lots of trigger warnings: rape, murder, torture. None of it felt like darkness for shock value. It was dark as part of the story, more about the genuinely bad parts that people are capable of than about gore for the sake of it.
I listened to this as an ALC, and the narration was great. It’s multiple POV across multiple timelines, which can be a recipe for getting lost, but the pacing was handled really well and I never struggled to track who or when I was with. I listened to a good chunk of this while visiting my parents in Florida, and there is a creepy stretch I happened to be listening to while running through the little forested area in their community. I absolutely got spooked and ran faster.
This is a dark, twisty thriller. It is very much not a cozy mystery, which is usually my comfort zone, so the fact that it pulled me in says something. If you love a twisty thriller and you’re okay sitting with some dark material, this is for you. If you’re after something gentler, maybe sit this one out. As for me, between this and the Finlay book I forgot I’d read, I think this is officially an author I’ll keep picking up going forward.
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