The Killer Wedding

A former spy, a society wedding and a groom who needs saving from absolutely everything; including himself.

James Ashworth-Pemberton is wealthy, trusting and fundamentally decent.

He drives in ski boots, puts ketchup on everything his mother considers sacred and loves with a devotion that is either deeply profound or profoundly stupid. Possibly both.

So when James falls madly in love with a brilliant Ukrainian tech entrepreneur he meets at a yacht party on the C?te d’Azur and proposes within months, his best friend Henry starts watching.

Because beautiful women at yacht parties are rarely there by accident.

He was right to watch. But he was wrong about what he was watching for. Anastasia Kovalenko isn’t what she seems.

Her past is far darker and more dangerous than anyone at the top table suspects and when a ‘brother’ nobody has ever heard of arrives from nowhere with cold eyes and a colder smile, Henry knows something is very wrong.

But the threat isn’t coming for the bride, it’s coming for the groom and someone wants James dead before the first dance.

First, though, there’s a stag do to survive. A private jet to Verbier. A chalet full of vintage champagne and people with absolutely no sense of self-preservation.

The kind of weekend where someone nearly dies in a sauna, someone else loses a small fortune at a casino and the most dangerous item in anyone’s luggage turns out to be a homemade cocktail involving tequila and actual gunpowder.

James’s friends are loyal, fearless and completely unhinged. Keeping the groom alive until the wedding is already looking like a full-time job.

Then there’s the hen do in Bath. A Georgian townhouse. Champagne and confessions. A bride who has been carrying secrets for years, slowly letting her guard down for the first time.

And back home, a grandmother who has been making enquiries of her own; because Granny didn’t spend decades in intelligence without learning how to spot a dangerous man at a dinner table.

The wedding itself takes place at Hartington Hall, a honey-coloured Georgian country house in the Cotswolds that has been in the Earl of Cuckmere’s family for two hundred years and what follows is a single, glorious, catastrophic day of absolute chaos.

The groom’s life is saved, repeatedly and entirely by accident, by stolen lobsters, his mother’s snobbery about ketchup, an accidental sword parry during the cake-cutting and surprise fireworks that take out an attack drone.

There’s a formidable mother-in-law who treats the social hierarchy as a blood sport. An ex-intelligence grandmother with a very sharp eye for deception.

An usher who has filled the hot tub with live lobsters and sees absolutely no reason to apologise. A midnight hot air balloon escape that goes spectacularly wrong.

And at the centre of all of it, a bride who came to her own wedding fully prepared for the worst. Including a knife strapped to her garter.