Spotlight & Giveaway: EVERYONE IN THE GROUP CHAT DIES by L.M. Chilton

Today it is my pleasure to Welcome author L.M. Chilton to HJ!

Hi L.M. Chilton and welcome to HJ! We’re so excited to chat with you about your new release, EVERYONE IN THE GROUP CHAT DIES!

Please summarize the book for the readers here:

Imagine the cast of Friends trapped in I Know What You Did Last Summer, but make it a sleepy English village where the most exciting thing is usually the DoorDash delivery. Four room-mates are languishing in that special kind of purgatory where you’re technically an adult, but you’re still eating cereal for dinner and avoiding eye contact with your landlord.
The main character, Clare “Kirby” Cornell, is desperate for something to happen. And it does, when a new flatmate arrives —a Gen Z crime influencer with more followers than common sense—and quickly goes missing. Turns out, something very interesting has been lurking behind those quaint hedgerows all along…
 

Please share your favorite line(s) or quote from this book:

They say there are three sides to every story: mine, yours, and the truth.
So, which one do you want?
—–
A notification pings on an ancient group chat that I could’ve sworn I’d muted a long, long time ago. I swipe the notification to open the chat and read the message.
Despite the heat, the words send a shiver through me. I stare at the screen, rub the chlorine out of my eyes, then read it again.
Esme: miss me?
It’s the first message anyone has written in this group chat for ages, but that’s not the really weird thing.
The really weird thing is, Esme died twelve months ago.
——
Currently, we were four shows deep into what I called the Netflix Paradox: despite an almost infinite number of shows, there was absolutely nothing to watch. Or at least, nothing we
could agree on. I dreamed of a day when the world would have only two buttons on the remote—murders and cakes—and everyone’s lives would be a lot easier.

Please share a few Fun facts about this book…

• The inspiration: the idea for Everyone in the Group Chat Dies came from the quiet suburban English village I grew up in – garden parties, leafy streets, the occasional passive-aggressive note about bin collection. Everyone assumes these sorts of places are peaceful, but there’s often something dark festering behind the climbing wisteria. I wanted to capture the desperate boredom of being a young adult there, where you’d kill for literally anything to happen. (Careful what you wish for, Kirby.)
• Murder goes modern: I’d been obsessed with the title for ages and kept thinking about classic Agatha Christie setups—everyone trapped on a remote island, a luxurious train, an isolated mansion. All very glamorous. But in 2025, where are people actually trapped? Their group chats of course! That’s the modern closed circle—a digital prison where the killer has the Wi-Fi password and nobody can escape without looking rude.
• Can you really trust social media? The book digs into how we get our news from apps like TikTok now—scrolling past cat videos straight into unsolved homicides. Esme is a Gen Z crime influencer who crowdsources investigations with her followers, but of course the algorithm rewards sensationalism over the truth. Kirby’s a local newspaper journalist watching her industry crumble in real-time, so she’s drawn to Esme’s viral success but also deeply suspicious of it.
  Stuck in the middle: This book is fundamentally about being stuck. Kirby’s stuck between youth and proper adulthood. She’s stuck between the dying world of print journalism and the new digital media. And she’s catastrophically stuck in the friend zone with Dylan, her hunky room-mate. The whole book is her trying to unstick herself from all these different kinds of limbo, ideally without getting murdered in the process.

What first attracts your Hero to the Heroine and vice versa?

It’s a will-they-won’t-they between two room-mates – very Ross and Rachel! Dylan is the local heartthrob—think “every mum in the village has asked if he’s single” levels of handsome. Kirby is shy, a bit awkward, and convinced she’s not in his league. So she does absolutely nothing about her crush except overthink every interaction.
Meanwhile, Dylan actually thinks she’s completely adorable—precisely because she doesn’t realize she is, and probably the fact that she’s one of the few women in town who doesn’t throw herself at him.

Did any scene have you blushing, crying or laughing while writing it? And Why?

There’s a (mildly!) spicy scene that takes place in the back of a Mini during a torrential storm. (excerpt below) If you’ve never seen a Mini, they’re approximately the size of a shoebox with wheels. Kirby and Dylan are squished into the backseat and the windows are fogging up. They can’t drive anywhere because the roads are flooded, and they’ve just had a screaming argument. Forced proximity, pent-up feelings and British weather combine until the sexual tension bubbles over…

Readers should read this book….

If they like nineties slasher movies with a splash of British humor.

What are you currently working on? What other releases do you have in the works?

My next book is I Think We Should Kill Other People. It’s about a woman who goes on a Love Island-style reality show, gets engaged, and then—oops—leaves her fiancé at the altar on live television. Unfortunately for her, she then gets trapped in a Norwegian airport with her ex and his entire horrified wealthy family during a snowstorm. Even more unfortunately, people start dying. It’s like if Love Is Blind met And Then There Were None at an airport Starbucks.
 

Thanks for blogging at HJ!

Giveaway: US only. 3 finished copies of EVERYONE IN THE GROUP CHAT DIES

To enter Giveaway, please share this post (FB – Twitter) and Leave a comment to this Q: What draws you to this book?

This giveaway closes 3 days from the date of this post.

Excerpt from EVERYONE IN THE GROUP CHAT DIES:

When I remained silent, he opened the door to get out again. “Okay, well, fine, I’ll leave you alone now. We’ll wait for you in the pub.”
“Wait, you don’t get off that easy,” I said to him, yanking on the sleeve of his whites. “What gives you the right to treat me like a child?”
“Because you’re acting like a child!” he said.
“Do. Not. Call. Me. A. Child.”
“I didn’t say you were a child, I said you were acting like one.”
“Jesus, who’s acting like a child now?” I huffed.
“Okay, look, I’m sorry I went off on one back there. It’s only because I care.”
“You care? Why?” I unfolded my arms and turned to face him. “You’re moving out soon. We probably won’t see each other much anymore anyway.”
His lips tightened and he breathed out sharply through his nose. “Why do I care? You’re seriously asking me that?”
“Yes, Dylan, I am really asking you that. We’re just flatmates.
We’ve not even known each other that long. I’ll probably get fired and be back in London by Christmas. So why do you give a shit what I do? You have your TRLs to keep you busy.”
He shook his head and looked directly at me. “You know
what your problem is, Kirby Cornell? You can’t see what’s right in front of your eyes.”
A tingle ran through me. Did that mean what I thought it did?
“And what exactly am I supposed to be looking at?” I asked.
“Come on, isn’t it obvious? You really haven’t noticed? I like you, Kirby.”
“Give over. You flirt with everyone,” I mumbled.
“Not the way I do with you!” he said. His face was getting closer to mine now. “You just don’t see it, I don’t know why! Every time I pay you a compliment, you play it down. And every time I flirt with you, you just laugh at me, or get annoyed. I don’t know what else I have to do to make you see that—”
Before I knew what I was even doing, I kissed him. The tannin of red wine mingled with my cherry lip salve, creating an intoxicating cocktail I couldn’t resist. Or maybe I was just drunk. Yes, very possibly I was just drunk. But it had been a very long day.
“Wow, um, okay,” Dylan said, leaning back.
“Sorry,” I said, suddenly feeling embarrassed. “I don’t know where that came from. It was the only way I could think of to shut you up for a second.”
He opened his mouth in mock indignation. “Wait, me? You’re telling me to stop talking?” He laughed. “That’s rich, coming from—”
“Don’t,” I said. “Otherwise I’ll do it again.”
Dylan raised both of his conventional eyebrows.
“Kirby Cornell, you can shut me up anytime you like,” he said, a grin spreading across his face.
I leaned into him again, and he kissed me back, hard, and my hand found its way under his damp chef’s whites.
“You sure?” he asked, looking down as I ran my fingers across his stomach.
“Hmm, I dunno, you did call me immature,” I said, moving my hand up to his chest.
“What if I told you you’re also incredibly perceptive, very hot, and I really like your car?”
“Okay, now I’m sure,” I said, kissing him again.
Please include a Question for the readers (Conversation starter)
Can we trust social media more than we trust the news?

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
 
 

Book Info:

From the breakout author of Swiped comes a compulsively readable, surprisingly funny, and genuinely thrilling pageturner about a TikTok true crime investigator, a ’90s serial killer that may not be as dead as everyone would like, a text thread from hell, and long buried secrets that just won’t stay in the grave where they belong.

Kirby Cornell needs a break from everything:

– Her crumbling apartment in the sleepy town of Crowhurst (famous for its bucolic countryside and a second-rate serial killer from the ’90s).
– Her dead-end job.
– Her sleazy landlord
– Her messy roommates.
– And, most of all, the terrible thing they all did.

Luckily, that hasn’t caught up with her just yet. Until a new message on their old group chat pops up: Everyone in the group chat dies.

It’s the first text her ex-roommate Esme has sent for ages, but that’s not the really weird thing.

The really weird thing is, Esme died twelve months ago…

Don’t miss the new laugh-out-loud thriller from L.M. Chilton, Everyone in the Group Chat Dies—a murder mystery that fuses the comedy of Friends with the serial killer thrills of I Know What You Did Last Summer.
Book Links: Book Links: Amazon | B&N | iTunes | kobo | Google |
 
 

Meet the Author:

L.M. Chilton is a journalist with fifteen years of experience working on a variety of television shows, such as This Morning, Loose Women, and more. His writing has appeared in Cosmopolitan, Glamour, Metro (London), and The Mirror (London). A former self-proclaimed dateoholic, L.M. Chilton has been on over a hundred dates over the last few years.
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