by Mark Edwards
First published 2025
Six old friends gather in a Notting Hill townhouse to toast the memory of a professor who brought them together in 1999. He hired them to help build a dating website powered by psychological testing, and his recent death has pulled them back into each other's orbit for one bittersweet evening. Then someone produces a gun. The ultimatum is simple and brutal: each person reveals their darkest secret to the group, or they start killing each other. As the night unravels, it becomes clear the threat is rooted in that summer twenty-six years ago. The love questionnaire they built for the dating site was quietly repurposed into something else entirely, a tool connected to a tragedy they have never fully reckoned with. The Wasp Trap moves between the present standoff and the events of that long-ago summer, pulling six complicated people into sharper focus with every chapter. Someone in that room knows more than they are saying. The question is whether the truth will come out before someone dies.
Genres: drama, mystery, contemporary, adult-fiction, thriller, psychological-thriller
Vibes: atmospheric, claustrophobic, dark, suspenseful, tense, thought-provoking
Tropes: dual-timeline, found-family, secrets-revealed, unreliable-narrator
Setting: Notting Hill, London
Period: 1999, 2025, 26 years ago
327 pages · Hardcover · Atria Books
Content warnings: death, murder, violence