Exclusive Cover Reveal + Excerpt: Darkly Funny Thriller Safari Murder Party

The thriller genre is an exciting place in the world of publishing these days. Gone are the paint-by-number murder mysteries, traditional settings, or brooding antihero detectives. In their place are, well…everyone else. Now you can’t visit a bookshop without tripping over cozy stories of book clubs solving crimes, dramatic relationship crash-outs that involve everything from stalking to fake identies, techno thrillers abou the dangers of social media, or serial murderers who might not be as unrelatable. as their crimes lead you to assume. 

From relationship-focused cat and mouse games to domestic mysteries and, with a dash of technological suspense or even serial murder thrown on top, it’s a space that truly feels like it has opened up like never before. Case in point, Rachel Moore’s forthcoming Safari Murder Party, a thriller set at a work retreat gone wrong. Described as The Most Dangerous Game meets The Hunger Games, the story follow two office rivals who must put aside their interoffice issues in the name of a game of survival of the fittest.

Here’s the story’s synopsis. 

After three years working seventy-hour weeks as assistant to the most terrifying CEO in the magazine world, Fletcher Spence finally finagled a spot on Cartwright Media’s annual corporate retreat—a famously luxurious week on the Cartwrights’ private island, where promotions are handed out like party favors. And her plan to snag her dream job as a travel magazine photographer was going great…until her boss’s dramatic death reveals his last will and testament: Whoever survives the week will inherit the company.

So now she’s stuck on her billionaire boss’s safari park island, surrounded by wild animals and on the run from coworkers who’ve swapped coffee cups for machetes and briefcases for hunting rifles.

To Fletcher’s dismay, her only ally might be her boss’s insufferably gorgeous son, Waylon Cartwright. Despite their hostile history, Fletcher is at least 80 percent sure he won’t try to kill her this week. Plus, his experience on the island might come in handy while they fend off lions and tigers and…marketing executives? Oh my.

While Fletcher battles her own ambitions and her unexpected attraction to Waylon, her power-hungry, bloodthirsty colleagues will do anything to stop them from escaping with their lives. Everyone knows the media industry is cutthroat, but in this safari party, it’s never been more true.

Safari Murder Party won’t hit shelves until May 19, 2026, but we’ve got an exclusive first look at its colorful cover—-as well as a sneak peek from the story itself. 

prologue

Wilderness hummed around Fletcher as she fought to catch her breath. She’d grown begrudgingly used to its melody over the last few days—the whistle of hot wind through the reeds at the watering hole, the elephant trumpet in the distance, the frog song from the jungle thick.

Of all the people Fletcher thought she’d be here with, the last was Waylon.

Waylon, who tried to sabotage her career when it had barely begun.

Waylon, who had every right to inherit the Cartwright legacy and none of the qualifications.

Waylon, who was holding a steak knife to her throat, the blade pinching her skin.

Something greedy burned in his gaze. A hunger. Like he’d been wanting to do this for a long time and only now got the chance.

“I want to trust you,” he said, the steel scraping across her rapid pulse.

Breathing. Fletcher wasn’t breathing. “Then, trust me.”

“But how do I know you won’t betray me?”

“I could ask you the same thing.” The last week flashed behind Fletcher’s eyes. Sparkling cocktails served with gourmet meals. Handshake deals signed with blood. And now, a knife to her throat. Careful, she asked, “What do you need to convince you?”

His voice was low in her ear. “Tell me what you want, Spence, and I’ll let you live.”

Last month, she could have answered his question in a heartbeat. TSA Pre-check. An invitation to the company retreat. A byline in the travel magazine she’d sold her soul to. But that was before. Before she’d ever set foot on this patch of untamed land, and before there was a serrated edge against her esophagus.

He was asking the wrong question. She knew what she wanted.

What was she willing to do to get it?

chapter one

three weeks earlier

Fletcher could be dead, and she’d still see the safari when she closed her eyes.

The mock-up November issue of Cartwright Media’s Jet-Setter magazine splayed across the workshop table in front of her, right next to a paper takeout box spilling with lo mein and her phone, where some fraction of her consciousness watched her boss’s little blue dot travel up Fifth Avenue. The rest of her attention was glued to the glossy photograph

For the last half hour, she’d stared at the magazine. Something was off.

She stabbed her fork into the noodles, swirling them mindlessly until the bite was so big she had to unhinge her jaw to chew. “It’s missing something.”

“Add sriracha,” Ford said from the other side of his desktop.

From here, all she could see was a thin stripe of her co-worker’s bleached blond hair, but she knew he was scrubbing through test shots from last week’s luggage shoot in Bali, featuring a pair of mated toucans and what’s being dubbed “the perfect weekender bag.”

“Not Szechuan’s,” she said. “Page twenty-three.”

If she’d been behind the camera, she would’ve framed the shot differently, angled the model forty-five degrees clockwise, and called out for more emotion. The centerfold spread—a spotlight on Southern Hemisphere wildlife experiences—should’ve popped. Instead, it was lopsided and top-heavy, guiding readers’ eyes away from the page instead of toward it.

Pacing across the design room, Fletcher swatted the magazine onto Ford’s desk and pointed at the bald composition. The page was literally missing something. “Shouldn’t there be something else in this third to balance it out?”

“By it, do you mean the naked man holding a strategically placed weekend bag next to a lion?”

“I’m serious,” Fletcher said.

“That doesn’t mean anything,” Ford said. “You’re Fletcher Spence. You’re always serious.”

Truthfully, she didn’t want to hear his boss chew him out for not catching the framing error. But also she wouldn’t say no if the Editor-in-Chief walked through the design lab doors and offered Fletcher a spot on her staff. (Her bank account could really use the promotion, too.)

“He looks displaced, off-center—” Fletcher’s eyebrows raised when she grazed the lines cleaved against his hip bones. What came next disappeared off the bottom of the page. “—delicious.”

Ford flicked her hand away where it lingered. “Have you forgotten your farm-fresh boyfriend so quickly?”

Fletcher couldn’t possibly roll her eyes far enough into her head. When work best friends became real life best friends, there was always an uncomfortable overlap in professionalism. Even more so when the best friend in question was Ford Jepson, who had never once conceptualized personal privacy. They were purely platonic—Ford exclusively dated men with Guy Fieri goatees or people of any gender who could bench press his body weight, and being that Fletcher was neither, her long-distance love life was frankly none of his concern.

She settled on saying, “Kent and I are fine.”

“When’s the last time you’ve seen him?” Ford asked. “Phone sex can only sustain someone for so long.”

She didn’t bother informing him that she wasn’t having phone sex at all because Kent said it made him feel vulnerable, which made Fletcher feel like a jar of homemade kombucha that needed a release. But when you’ve been with someone as long as Fletcher had been with Kent, that was totally normal, right?

Satisfied there wasn’t any juicy gossip to squeeze out of her, Ford’s eyebrows cinched as he reverted his focus to the photo and picked at his thumb nail. A terrible habit. Fletcher stopped destroying her nails cold turkey in high school when college applications and internship interviews came front and center. She needed to be pristine, right down to the cuticle.

Just like the November issue if Ford wanted to keep his job.

“You know I’m right,” she said, looping her purse over her shoulder and chucking the dregs of her lo mein into the garbage. “Jackie will thank you.”

“Will I?” A voice, bright as the midday sun, chimed behind her. “Spending lunch on my floor again, Fletcher?”

Jackie Caldera was known for three things: becoming Jet-Setter’s youngest Editor-in-Chief three years ago at a ripe thirty-nine; once beating the CEO’s son at a company outing to Top Golf; and wearing a bold red swatch of Chanel lipstick every day without fail. This afternoon, it was smeared under her bottom lip, the aftermath of a lunch meeting at the new Nordic-Japanese fusion bistro in Hell’s Kitchen with the C-Suite.

Even slightly smudged, she was still the HBIC. Jackie commanded every room she walked into—especially the Art and Design Lab on the 43rd floor of Cartwright Media’s Fifth Avenue office.

“On my way out,” Fletcher said, her voice sliding easily back into its corporate-girl cadence as she propped the door open with her hip. “Don’t worry about the centerfold bleed on page thirty, either. Ford’s on it.” She answered Ford’s petrified look with a mouthed You’re welcome. 

Stepping into the hall, she scooped her phone out of her purse at the exact moment it started ringing, crooning, “Good afternoon, Mr. Cartwright. How was your lunch?”

On the other end of the phone call, her boss’s crackling tenor was cut off by sirens. Which meant he was outside the building. It’d give her plenty of time to get back upstairs into position. “You know I love Japanese whisky, Miss Spence. Remind me what’s on my calendar this afternoon?”

Fletcher jammed the elevator button for the penthouse. There was a whoosh on the other end of the line as Dyer must have stepped into the front lobby. Right on schedule.

“I canceled your afternoon appointment with Dr. Hawks like you asked, so all that’s left is for you to finalize the guest list for the Lydell trip, and I’ll send out invitations before the end of the day.”

“It’s on my desk,” Dyer said.

“Fabulous.” Fletcher prayed he didn’t hear the hopeful way her words tipped upward.

She shimmied through the elevator doors the second they pried open. Walls of unstreaked glass showcased the Upper East Side sprawl, glittering windows teetering upon two-hundred-year-old streets. She didn’t need to glance at her reflection to know how she looked: her white polyester blouse was tucked into a TJ Maxx pencil skirt, a pair of second-hand black heels clicked with every step, and her strawberry blonde hair was slicked into a low ponytail that draped over her shoulder. Absolutely no frizz. No wrinkles.

Weaving around a couple leather armchairs carefully positioned beneath a crystal chandelier, she headed for the frosted glass door at the far end of the floor—Dyer’s office. “Also, Jackie had a late morning meeting with Melv Lexington, something about an ownership dispute, but it might be worth a debrief if you’re up for it. It’s her third meeting with Legal this month. Not sure where the holdup is.”

Dyer hummed. “Send him up to me after my one o’clock. I need him to look over some paperwork before the trip.”

“You don’t have a one o’clock—” Fletcher was saying as she swung open the door.

Some things Fletcher had grown to expect to see when stepping into Dyer’s office.

A display of the world’s finest liquors, some with six-figure price tags.

A glass case housing a hand-carved ivory cane and the vintage Remington poaching weapon, both inherited from his grandfather: the publishing mogul who created the eponymous Cartwright Media in 1924 to catalog his world travels.

The first issue of Jet-Setter, framed in three-ply glass. Dusty and yellow, edges curled and ink faded. A snapshot of a hammock between two palms stamped with the same swirly retro lettering still used today.

But in all the years she’d been by Dyer’s side, Fletcher had never walked into Dyer’s office expecting to see him.

Excerpted from Safari Murder Party by Rachel Moore Copyright © 2026 by Rachel Moore. Excerpted by permission of Berkley. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.

Safari Murder Party will be released on May 19, 2026.        

Lacy Baugher Milas writes about Books and TV at Paste Magazine, but loves nerding out about all sorts of pop culture. You can find her on Twitter and Bluesky at @LacyMB