Thank you to publisher Hodder & Stoughton via NetGalley for this ARC a first by this author and will definitely be reading more by this author
A slow burn thriller mystery set in New Orleans that kept the pages turning so many characters but easily to keep track of them all
Follows two different times the then and now to unravel the mystery of missing the person Daniel, The sister hosts a dinner party with the people closest to him to find answers which delivers a twist at the end. A very good summer read which I finished in a day.

Another masterpiece from Alice Slater!
I absolutely loved Alice’s debut and couldn’t wait to get stuck into this! It was just as funny, just as shocking and just as twisted and I loved every single minute of it! Devoured in one sitting… I highly recommend this book! Thank you to netgalley and the publishers for my ARC

Alice Slater’s sophomore outing has a delicious premise: a dinner party is arranged to get to the bottom of a missing persons case. Maybe a murder case. Beautiful, quixotic, terrible Daniel is missing in New Orleans and his sister is frantic with worry. She gathers a motley crew of his friends and frenemies to try to figure out where he has gone - but everyone has their own past with Daniel, and so, everyone’s a suspect. Especially the psychic who was one of the last people to see Daniel alive…

Thrillingly, much of the novel is set in New Orleans - a place I think Slater captured perfectly in all its humid, colourful, messy glory. I desperately want to visit the city now and bill Alice for the trip; it’s absolutely lush to read. The descriptions of dive bars, chilled cocktails, and local cuisine had me itching to book a flight, even though there is a distinctly unsettling vibe, too, like something is going to go wrong for our characters. And go wrong they do! The novel follows two timelines, and uses multiple narrators (more on that later) to explain what’s gone wrong in the past to lead to Daniel’s disappearance.

The dual timelines worked really well, for me, the multiple narrators less so; I got the point but had a bit of trouble keeping everyone straight in my head. They’re all fairly unlikeable but with the notable, glorious exception of Caroline, in a way that I wanted more from. I wanted Succession levels of unlikeable, instead I got fairly annoying, pampered Brits. I did enjoy Selina, with her turquoise hair and Occulty vibes, particularly as a foil to the deeply crusty Sage, who is legitimately anti-vaxx and deeply cursed as a character.

Let the Bad Times Roll does come to a satisfying conclusion, though, and I was hooked for the vast majority of this novel. When the plot slows down - this is an oddly slow burn for its short length - the vibes carried me through. A perfect read for a long hot summer day, preferably with a beer in hand - or even better, a Death in the Afternoon.

Honestly I wasnt wowed by this.
At times I became a little bored. While other times I was a little interested in where the story could go.
Overall, however, I feel like this will be easily forgotten by me.

I tore through this book in a matter of days - it had me completely hooked from the first chapter. Alice Slater crafts a cleverly constructed story full of flawed, fascinating characters who felt so real.The plot is packed with unexpected twists and turns that kept me hooked, and I genuinely appreciated the moments of humour that caught me off guard and made me laugh out loud. Sharp, surprising, and satisfyingly chaotic.

im still buzzing from this book. it was just so good! you are pulled in, right in, by both the authors writing style and the plot shes given us. the book just pops off the pages to you.
we are given a few characters some with more flaws than others. they are all linked to a missing man Daniel. we have people in his present and a person in the past and we are rewarded the links and backstory in both flashback and present form.
the scene setting in this book is just beyond and it felt like the people and scenes came alive for me in my minds eye.
this group all come together in London via Caroline who is Daniels sister. at this dinner party are all those who are closest to him including a woman or should i say psychic and tarot reader who was the last person said to have seen Daniel. but as the dinner party ensues we get more secrets,whispers and tension developing and we slowly unravel just what is happening here. finding out just as Alice revealed it for me was just delicious. i would gasp, or be outwitted and sometimes was proved correct in my theories. but all the time Alice kept me hooked and not wanting to put this book down or leave the characters behind.
i loved this book. it was just fabulous.

I enjoyed Death of a Bookseller so I was very much looking forward to Let the Bad Times Roll and I was not disappointed. This is clever book -the descriptions are lush and exotic, the characterisations are excellent and the plot intriguing.

None of the characters is particularly pleasant but I found Selina to be the most sympathetic. The Selina and Daniel sections are especially deliciously descriptive. New Orleans is portrayed so well that I felt I was there and my liver ached just reading about the amount of booze they put away.

Very enjoyable.

I loved Alice Slater's debut, 'Death of a Bookseller,' so when I had the opportunity to read a review copy through NetGalley, I was delighted. That second novel is said to be difficult, but Alice Slater has, in my opinion, written something even better than her first book.

This novel is set partly in London and partly in New Orleans. Siblings Caroline and Daniel have always done everything together, with Caroline acting as the parent since their parents died. Now Caroline is hosting a dinner party as she has been informed that Daniel is missing in New Orleans. Present is Richard, whom Caroline and Daniel knew at university. Also present are Sage and Max, who knew Daniel from his time in a band, and Selina, who met Daniel in New Orleans and has been asked by Caroline to provide any information she knows about what happened.

Gradually, as the evening wears on, we hear the stories of those at the dinner party and their relationship with Daniel. Selina reads tarot cards and believes herself something of a psychic. She travelled to New Orleans alone, where she met Daniel - handsome, funny, charming, believable...

If you enjoyed Bookseller, you will devour this, oh-so-dark tale of how Daniel weaved his way through the world and the lives of these characters. Slater takes the reader deftly through a novel of manipulation and obsession. She is a confident tour guide, her places presented realistically, her characters well-rounded. I loved this and will happily buy anything else Alice Slater cares to write. I hope she has a long and successful career ahead of her.

This is a really well written and cleverly constructed novel about a bunch of horrible people using each other to reach their own ends. All the characters felt really original and memorable, the settings in turn evocative and claustrophobic. I'd give it five stars except that reading it was kind of bleak, too many horrible people, no glimmer of redemption. It's a great book but I'm not sure how much I actually enjoyed it. I'm sure it will be one of those that sticks in my mind for a long time though.

Loved this book. I found myself laughing out loud a lot of times. Will definitely recommend to others and will be picking up other books!

As you know, I'm a big fan of Alice Slater's debut Death of a Bookseller and podcast #whatpageareyouonpod, so I was sure to request this and read as soon as I could. Let the Bad Times Roll is out on 10th July, a really vibey mystery, set in large part in New Orleans, where a charismatic young man called Daniel goes missing. His overbearing older sister Caroline hosts a dinner party with his close friends and a psychic (!) he met while travelling to attempt to find some answers, and the novel is structured in the courses that she so meticulously puts together.

With each course, another person tells their side of the story to the group, as well as telling the audience the full truth of their relationship with Daniel, who was never really known by any of them. I didn't like any of the characters at all, though I don't think you're supposed to, so I wasn't really rooting for anyone and that meant I wasn't too concerned with the mystery element - but I was deeply interested in the ✨vibes✨

It's brilliant on New Orleans, first of all, where I've never been but if I ever go ill just follow this itinerary. The food all sounded amazing, but especially the cocktails, and the way she conjured up the vibe of the venue or the scene or the feeling the characters tried to chase with that kind of food writing was 🤌🤌🤌.

I was also interested in the use of the occult and mysticism in this novel, and at first I thought the psychic functioned more as a device in the book or to show that kind of association with New Orleans, but later I was interested in how some characters could turn on or off that interest depending on what benefited them. I was intrigued by the mention of The Murder Girls podcast which appears in her first book, and the various types of tourists in the novel who are interested in death and violence "recreationally", as well as who profits off this - an interesting thread in both novels that made me even more inclined to read another by Slater.

A dark, addictive thriller full of horrible but compelling characters.

A New Orleans-inspired dinner party. A group of friends connected by dark pasts. A missing person and a search for the truth. As the evening unfurls, so do histories and truths that keep us guessing about the real motives of these people until the very end.

All the good and the bad of New Orleans comes alive in these pages, making me wistful for every fancy cocktail in dark bars, cup of gumbo and even drinks in plastic cups in stick-floored tourist places. While we didn't get to spend loads of time with some characters, and there are lots of perspectives, their voices feel distinctive and the story is still clear and races on in a way that many that is not the case for many similarly structured books.

And while some of the grimy fates and happenings felt inevitable, the last question of 'what happened' kept me guessing until the end.

I haven't been these addicted to a book in ages, and I would highly recommend it to anyone wanting a twisted thriller, especially one full of wanderlust.

I absolutely adored Death of a Bookseller, and was on the lookout for Let the Bad Times Roll, which I approached with a little concern, could it live up to my extremely high expectations after the superb first novel, or would it suffer the curse of the second book? I needn't have worried, Let the Bad Times Roll is as wonderful and as memorable as Death of a Bookseller (I also actually squealed when I saw the wee crossover!)
It follows a motley crew of characters, most of whom are unlikeable, but as with her first novel, Alice manages to create people who are engaging, and storylines which are riveting and need to be followed until the very end. I whipped through this book very quickly and it is one which I will return again.
Don't hesitate, buy and read it now!
Thanks to NetGalley, the author and the publishers for a digital copy of the book in exchange for an honest review.

I really enjoyed Alice’s debut novel, Death of a Bookseller, so I was thrilled when her second book was announced and even more thrilled to receive an ARC!

Alice’s writing in DOAB was great, but it is absolutely sublime in Let the Bad Times Roll! She has really honed her craft and the writing was so rich and evocative, especially when describing the sights, sounds and tastes of New Orleans.

I loved the different perspectives of each of the characters - this added so much to the story, and each character was very well fleshed out and developed. I honestly think the book could have been longer and given us even more of each character.

I loved the twists and turns in the story, and the reveals were so good, I couldn’t put this down. My only tiny gripe was that the ending felt a little rushed, and I’d have liked a touch more focus on the final event of the story.

Overall an excellent read, and I can’t wait to read what Alice writes next.

Finished this a couple of days ago now but it's had very good staying power in my head and I keep thinking about it and wanting to go back to these characters.

Slater brought New Orleans to life in an amazing way for an "unreliable narrator"-type thriller, creating a dizzying whirlwind of a week filled with oysters, tarot cards, and cocktails. However, there was a repetitiveness in the language that got distracting for me: a few too many references to drinks "spiked with absinthe" and what at times felt like a race to name-drop as many beverages as possible. It was a vibe though!

The plot was deliciously twisty and I loved how she built up her character dynamics. None of them were particularly likeable, but they all felt real. Her writing craft has had a full glow up since Death of a Bookseller (which I enjoyed, don't get me wrong!) and I was on the edge of my seat the entire way through.

What fun I had with this! I devoured it in a day. It's a novel about a scammer, of course, my generation's favourite type of crime. Charismatic Daniel is missing in New Orleans; his sister Caroline throws a dinner in London and invites three of his friends, plus a psychic who claims to have spent the past two weeks with Daniel in Louisiana. Between them all, surely, they'll get to the truth of the matter. And they do, although not in the way Caroline expects. This is just so great on detail: the smells, sounds, tastes and emotions of a city that relies on marketing its history to survive; the strange combination of euphoria and creeping inauthenticity that produces. Every character is convincing, though we get much more time with Selina, the psychic, than most of the others, and I'd have liked a more even spread. (That's rare; usually in novels with five point-of-view characters I think at least three are superfluous or badly done.) The third quarter of this book is hard to read if you have traumatic financial experiences in your past, I'll warn you now. On the other hand, when the bad times start rolling—when the violence begins—I gulped it down with pure glee. Which is a morally dubious reaction, I know, but man does Slater do catharsis! This is a dream of a summer read, and deserves to be huge.

Alice Slater is a strong voice in the domestic, twisted thriller genre. Death of a Bookseller was a runaway hit and Let The Bad Times Roll is equally as exciting.

Absolutely loved this thrilling read - full of twists and turns!
Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for an early reading copy.

What a book. A love letter to New Orleans, and proof that Alice Slater doesn’t have to worry about the dreaded “2nd album” nerves that plagues so many writers and artists alike.
I inhaled this over a weekend, immediately drawn in by her excellent prose and storytelling, this novel is the right mix of funny and tense, with people that you may not love, but do want to read about.
You can tell how much Alice Slater loves New Orleans, and that she’s clearly done her research while writing the book. I can’t wait to buy a physical copy when it’s out, and convince my friends to do the same!
4.5 stars, rounded up to 5!

WOW, Slater has dialed it up to 11 with Let the Bad Times Roll. Where her debut was dark and decadent but with a sprinkling of fun and humour, LTBTR is like the cooler older cousin - it draws you in and doesn't let you go, shocks you, engulfs you, and leaves you reeling after finishing the final page.

The whole book is set across a dinner being held in London by Caroline, whose brother Daniel has gone missing in New Orleans. At the dinner are Daniel's closest friends and also the last person to see Daniel who happens to be a psychic and tarot reader. As the dinner progresses, secrets are revealed and the tension rises as the mystery comes to it's head.

What I adored about this book is the setting of New Orleans. Having been to the city myself last year, it was easy to get lost in Slater's vivid descriptions of the streets, bars, tastes and smells. The whole experience of the book completely transports you, and it's easy to see Slater has a deep love and passion for the city which comes across in the writing and knowledge of the area. There was also a real appreciation for Southern culture and writing and the entire book really reminded me of a Donna Tartt novel with the way the main characters interacted. The parts where it flashed back to their time at university together had a Secret History edge, and the cast of characters give of a real vibe of exclusivity which made them all the more compelling. The gothic nature of this novel draws from both the atmosphere of New Orleans but also the Southern writers which have honed the craft before Slater, and she pays homage to them beautifully.

I was worried that nothing would beat Death of a Bookseller but I loved this just as much. Slater's storytelling was absolutely amazing and I adored the way this book moved forward. I already can't wait for her next work as her craft is just getting better and better.