Throughout the book you get to know the three leading ladies Siobhan, Miranda and Jane, I really enjoy a book from the different characters’ perspectives, I find it incredibly interesting as it really speeds up the pace of the book for me. I loved every female character in this book, but I must admit my heart really did fall for Jane, the sweetest character with a lot of self-doubt and worry, I was really rooting for Janey and so the ending (if you’ve read the book) made my heart swell! I loved every female character in this book, but I must admit my heart really did fall for Jane! Darcey Meticulously plotted, fresh and surprising but thrumming with that signature Beth O’Leary warmth we all adore, The No-Show is a dream of a novel from start to finish, even if it is a total enigma until the very end. In retrospect I tried to think of how I would feel if I thought of The No-Show as a mystery. But it wasn’t a mystery, and I find it hard to apply the rules of a mystery to a book that while not a romance, had at its heart three romantic relationships. It was just hard not to focus on the journey and not the resolution, when the resolution was such a big question mark. Beth O’Leary does it again! I’m a HUGE O’Leary fan but I have to admit, I wasn’t convinced she’d be able to trump her last novel, The Road Trip. Lo and behold I was wrong – This. This is O’Leary at her best!

The author’s last book, The Road Trip, also featured a plot where the reader doesn’t learn everything that transpired until late in the book. I’m not totally opposed to that sort of plot, but The No-Show takes it to extremes, with instances of intentional misdirection. Which, again, is the sort of thing I expect more from a mystery or thriller. So, when I first read the blurb, sometime before starting the book, I made a few assumptions. Rereading the blurb, it’s clear that to some degree I didn’t read closely enough, because one of the assumptions was that this was going to be “three women get together and get revenge on the cad who broke all of their hearts”, which is actually not indicated. As the blurb states, each relationship continues for some time after the standing-up in the beginning of the book, and in fact for the majority of the book none of the three even knows about the other two. there’s a half-drunk double-shot oat-milk latte on the table in front of her. If she’d known she was going to be stood up on Valentine’s Day, she’d have got proper milk. Siobhan is only vegan when she’s in a good mood.”I found myself frequently giggling at this book, and underlining my favorite phrases. There’s plenty of zingy dialogue and pithy noticings about social dynamics. Siobhan in particular is entertainingly self aware. Because of the unusual plot structure, I find myself having trouble working out how exactly I felt about The No-Show.

Without giving away the major twist of the book and ruining the whole reader experience, I think it’s important that readers know that only 2 of the 3 women get a romance HEA. The three women are distinctly different types. Siobhan is a former aspiring actress, confident and successful in her current career. She had a bad breakup with her last boyfriend, which makes her wary of getting into another relationship, but she has a lot of close friends, the closest of whom is her longtime roommate and bestie, Fiona. Siobhan is the glamorous one of the three protagonists. These three women are strangers who have only one thing in common: They’ve all been stood up on the same day, the very worst day to be stood up – Valentine’s Day. And, unbeknownst to them, they’ve all been stood up by the same man. The three romances are on different timelines (the Valentine’s Day no-shows all occur in different years – 2015, 2018 and 2019, IIRC), though the misdirection really tries to make the reader believe that they are simultaneous. For instance there is a scene with heroine #2 directly after a scene with heroine #1 in which heroine #2 finds a receipt for breakfast for two that seems like evidence of cheating – Joseph had had breakfast with heroine #1 in the previous scene. But they actually occur in completely different years and Joseph’s reason for hiding the fact that he wasn’t alone at breakfast has a reasonable explanation. FURTHER SPOILER At first, I didn’t want to like Joseph because he felt like a combination of the leads from Sister Wives and Dexter, a charmingly manipulative man with his own moral code. As readers, we slowly unpeel the ways his life intersects with the three very different women. And the more I learned about Joseph, the more he wormed his way into my heart just like the heroines. Joseph works in IT in London, but spends most of his time in his hometown of Winchester. He’s a lovable nerd, who just happens to be drop-dead gorgeous, and takes care of his mom with dementia even though she can’t help calling his girlfriend by the wrong name.I’ve read all of O’Leary’s books so far and this is my favorite since The Flatshare. I agree with alot of people that this doesn’t fit the structure (or really the tone) of a Romance novel, but O’Leary has always skirted the edge of that definition IMO. Once they’ve each forgiven him for standing them up, they are all in serious danger of falling in love with a man who may have not just one or two but three women on the go….