If you’re thinking about checking out The Spare Room yourself, don’t worry about spoilers. The first part of my reviews are always spoiler-free so you can see if the book is your cup of tea. After a quick summary and a basic review, I’ll give a spoiler warning and do a deep dive into everything I loved and hated about The Spare Room.

Andrea Bartz is the author of many other books, including We Were Never Here, a New York Times Bestseller and Reese’s Book Club pick that’s currently in development at Netflix, according to Bartz’s website. A triller author, travel and lifestyle writer, and magazine editor, The Spare Room is Bartz’s fourth book. With the book’s bisexual (queer) and polyamorous representation, it was well-timed smack-dab in the middle of Pride month.

Content Warning

I always like to give a quick content warning for any sensitive topics. These are some content warnings for The Spare Room:

Abuse.
Blood.
Death of an animal.
Intimacy.
Mental illness.
Murder.
Nudity.
Panic attacks.
Pregnancy.
Sexual assault.
Stalking.

Quick Synopsis

When Kelly and her long-time fiancé Mike are on the rocks, she respects his wishes for space and goes to stay with a high school friend turned New York Times bestselling author. Sabrina lives with her husband Nathan in an exclusive gated community outside of D.C., and when Kelly arrives, she settles right into her vacation and her newly rekindled relationship. As she explores the neighborhood, meets new characters, and gets closer and closer to Sabrina and Nathan, she can’t shake the feeling that something isn’t right.

My Rating

Everybody has to come up with their own system for judging and rating books, and here’s mine:

One star: I couldn’t finish the book. (DNF)
Two stars: I struggled to finish, but I did.
Three stars: This book was okay and worth reading.
Four stars: I liked this book and I would recommend it to a friend.
Five stars: I’d read this book again, and it’s going on my favorites shelf.

By no means do I think this is a perfect rating system, but I had to come up with something that would help me avoid arbitrarily assigning ratings. This provides a solid guideline for rating qualifications.

I gave The Spare Room an four-star rating because I enjoyed it and I would definitely recommend it to a friend, and especially to those who enjoy thrillers. This was a captivating and refreshing thriller that took turns I wasn’t expecting. If you’re looking for a fun summer read or a thriller with great bisexual representation, I highly recommend The Spare Room.

If you read The Spare Room and you liked it, these are some other books you may enjoy:

Summary

We’re now entering the spoiler-y part of this review. If you think The Spare Room sounds like your cup of tea, click away, read it, and come back to see if you agree or disagree with my critique. If you like the sound of the book but you don’t want to read it, don’t worry, I’ll give you the full rundown.

SPOILERS

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SPOILERS -

The Spare Room tells the story of Kelly, The Spare Room starts with a quick peek at something sinister, a figure hunched over at a sink, “Scrubbing and scrubbing and scrubbing at the blood stiffening at the cacks in their palms.”

We then flash to our protagonist, Kelly, on a train from Philadelphia to Virginia. This story takes place in the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, so she’s crying into her mask on the train as she thinks about the reason for her trip—to take some space from her long-time fiancé, Mike.

She arrives in Virginia and meets the gorgeous couple Nathan and Sabrina. Sabrina was an acquaintance in high school, and the two of them reconnected through Instagram. They’d been chatting every day for three weeks, and when Kelly told Sabrina Mike had put a pause on their wedding, Sabrina offered for her to come stay with her and Nathan.

Sabrina is a bestselling romance author and Nathan works for the Department of Defense. They live in a massive, gorgeous mansion in a secluded, gated neighborhood. Nathan is quirky and fun, but also weirdly intense about security, insisting that Kelly memorize the codes and not write them in her phone, lest they be hacked. He admits to having a gun in his end table and is worried about rabid fans of Sabrina, who have doxed her in the past.

Kelly eases into their home and finds herself enjoying her stay. Immediately, there’s tons of sexual tension between the three of them, as Kelly and Nathan are both very touchy-feely with Kelly. On one of her walks, Kelly meets a woman named Megan, who is also visiting from out of town.

One night, Kelly kisses Sabrina, and the three of them begin a polyamorous relationship. Kelly finally calls Mike and finalizes their separation, and he doesn’t take it as well as she thought he would. After calling him, she thinks:

She ghosts Megan to spend more time with the couple. Kelly soon finds out that Sabrina and Nathan have invited another woman into their marriage in the past, and that woman is currently missing.

This makes Kelly uncomfortable, but she tells herself to trust the Lamonts, who seem like good people. They have tons of sex, but they also develop their emotional relationships with one another, as Kelly says, “We unhook the velvet rope and let one another into our lives.”

Then, one night in the hot tub, during a sexual escapade, Sabrina and Nathan hold Kelly under the water, and she thinks she’s going to drown.

The two insist it was an accident and they didn’t realize how uncomfortable she was as she gags and coughs. She finds out the missing partner, Elizabeth, was last seen right outside the gate to the Lamont’s neighborhood, and she becomes even more spooked about the situation.

Kelly goes to stay in a hotel so she can clear her head and figure out what’s going on with the Lamonts, and if she actually believes they have something to do with Elizabeth’s disappearance. Sabrina is extra kind, saying she can give Kelly money for an Uber if she wants to leave, and that they’re sorry for keeping information from her.

When Kelly decides to come back to the Lamonts, she arrives to a weird vibe, with both of them being kind of avoidant of her. She goes to the basement to get a bottle of wine and finds Elizabeth, the missing partner.

Kelly immediately doesn’t like the implications of this. Elizabeth explains that she ran away because her ex-girlfriend, Renee, was abusing her. She regrets causing problems for the Lamonts, who have been questioned by the police and ostracized by their neighbors, suspected of being involved in Elizabeth’s disappearance.

That night, Kelly is sure to offer Elizabeth her spare room, saying she’ll sleep in bed with the Lamonts. The next morning, they wake to find Elizabeth covered in blood, dead in Kelly’s bed. The three of them immediately burst into hysterics, but Nathan insists they can’t call the cops. Since they’ve been questioned about Elizabeth’s disappearance, it will seem like they’ve been holding her captive and decided to kill her.

Kelly tries to run out to the gate and leave, but Nathan changes the code so she can’t get out. The three of them decide to lock their electronics away so nobody can contact the police, and they try to figure out who killed Elizabeth. Kelly and Sabrina find an ultrasound picture in Elizabeth’s bag, and Kelly begins to suspect that Nathan may have killed Elizabeth to cover up their relationship with her.

While talking, they realize Megan, who was trying very hard to be Kelly’s friend, is actually Renee, Elizabeth’s ex.

Later that night, Kelly goes into Nathan’s study to poke around, and realizes the pyramid figure on his desk has blood on the corner. She’s in shock, realizing he actually did kill Elizabeth, when she turns and finds him holding a gun to her.

They have a miscommunication—Nathan thinks he’s discovered Kelly with the murder weapons she used to kill Elizabeth, and Kelly thinks Nathan is mad that she’s found his murder weapon. The two get into a scuffle and the gun goes off, shooting and killing Nathan.

Sabrina arrives and after a moment of distress, the two of them realize they need to come up with a plan. They say Nathan kept them locked inside the house after killing Elizabeth, and that when Kelly tries to escape, he pulled his gun on her and the two got into a scuffle, which set the gun off and killed him.

After everything settles with the police, Sabrina and Kelly stay in the house, recovering from the event. They continue their relationship, and decide to move to New York City together. Kelly decides that she wants to stop and see Mike, to see how he’s doing.

When she gets there, they’re cordial, until Mike says something about Elizabeth dying in Kelly’s bed. Kelly freezes, knowing that information wasn’t public. It turns out that Mike, distraught over her breaking up with him, came to the house, and thought it was Kelly in the bed. He says he wasn’t going to do it, but when he went into the office, Elizabeth followed him, and he turned and hit her in the head.

Kelly is obviously very upset about this, but can’t say anything to the police, because it would reveal the cover-up that she and Sabrina carefully orchestrated. Following this, Kelly decides to go on her own for a little while, being single and moving back to Chicago.

Deep Dive

Praise

There are a lot of things I liked about this book, starting with the poly and bi-sexual representation. I’m not poly myself, so I can’t speak to the quality of that representation, but I did appreciate how, at the end of the book, the Sabrina and Kelly read a book about managing poly relationships, and realize some of their approaches with Nathan weren’t healthy.

I also thought that Sabrina and Kelly as bisexual (or pan, or queer) women was very natural, and I liked that the book spared only a few lines on these realizations. It felt very realistic, and I appreciated how The Spare Room didn’t linger on Kelly’s sexuality. Here’s a line from this section:

It can be refreshing for queer sexuality to be treated in the same way as heterosexuality—an assumption, a built-in fact, rather than an entire revelation and subject of the book. Could you imagine, if every time you read a straight romance book, it spent a lot of time first showing the characters realizing they’re straight?

I’m not saying it’s always bad to have characters exploring their sexuality, I just don’t think every book with queer characters needs to be about that, and it’s something I thought this book did well.

This story had a lot of layering, which made it harder to predict what was going to happen. I appreciated these layers and loose ends, like Renee, the neighbors, the Lamonts’ suspicious behavior, and even Kelly herself as an unreliable narrator.

Kelly describes herself as having an inner goblin, that sometimes makes her do things like going through other people’s things and suspecting Mike of cheating on her. When they’re reacting to the murder, Kelly sees the bleach under the sink, where she always accidentally puts it, and wonders briefly if it’s possible that she murdered Elizabeth.

When Kelly comes back from the hotel, I was also definitely not expecting her to find Elizabeth at their place, alive. I’d assumed she was dead, and that the Lamonts really did have something to do with her disappearance, even if they didn’t kill her themselves.

Finally, the last thing I liked about this one was just the fun summer vibes. The characters go swimming, enjoy a hot tub, go for walks to juice bars, and take selfies on loungers by the pool. The fantasy of going to someone’s beautiful house for the summer is an extra detail that makes this one a lot of fun to read.

Criticism

The first thing I didn’t like about the book was Mike’s role. For him to turn out as the killer, I would have liked a few more bread crumbs, or a few more little pieces of information that would show he was capable of something like that. I still thought it was a good ending, and fairly believable given the circumstances (him being alone in his apartment, watching through social media as Kelly had a good summer) but I would have liked just a little bit more.

I also thought that Sabrina and Kelly were fairly well characterized, but I thought Nathan’s character fell a little flat. I wanted to be more devastated at the idea of him being the murderer, but the bits about him being a “gun toting good-ol boy” weren’t super well balanced out with positive characteristics to make me not suspect him.

All in all, I thought this was a great summer thriller, and I gave it a four-star rating. I highly recommend this if you’re looking for a summery thriller with good pacing and queer rep.

These area some books I may read next:

Book Review | The Spare Room by Andrea Bartz