British survival games are weird. [The Last Resort by Susi Holliday]
When Amelia is invited to an all-expenses-paid retreat on a private island, the mysterious offer is too good to refuse. Along with six other strangers, she’s told they’re here to test a brand-new product for Timeo Technologies. But the guests’ excitement soon turns to terror when the real reason for their summons becomes clear.
Each guest has a guilty secret. And when they’re all forced to wear a memory-tracking device that reveals their dark and shameful deeds to their fellow guests, there’s no hiding from the past. This is no luxury retreat—it’s a trap they can’t get out of.
As the clock counts down to the lavish end-of-day party they’ve been promised, injuries and in-fighting split the group. But with no escape from the island—or the other guests’ most shocking secrets—Amelia begins to suspect that her only hope for survival is to be the last one standing. Can she confront her own dark past to uncover the truth—before it’s too late to get out?
I'm in the middle/working towards finishing several books. Maybe had I not run through six volumes of Attack on Titan I might have finished them. But I read those volumes, AND I'D DO IT AGAIN! The point is I'm happy to be finishing my reads for the year with another NetGalley read. Hitting that arbitrary and recently set goal of 150 books in 2020, only because of the six volumes? It felt a bit like cheating. So finishing the year with a book I'd received to review feels only right.
Susi Holliday's The Last Resort has a really interesting, really classic feeling sell. A murder mystery type of vibe, but all on a remote island. Seven strangers plus mysterious free vacation plus secrets revealed should equal tension filled mystery murder thriller, but it didn't. Characters were well-developed with detailed backstories and personality tensions seemingly leading to last-minute group triumph, but we got none of that. The backstories went nowhere. That one character who's good at geography? Oh, that's just a random fact that has no bearing on the story. In fact, everyone's role and outlined capacity did nothing to further the plot, they just were.
The writing isn't terrible and the story isn't the worst, but for me it went nowhere. There was no real payoff. The character actions were a bit ridiculous. After all the horror and personal invasion they'd repeatedly seen and suffered through, to just keep going along with everything so smoothly was more than a bit ridiculous. You think you've been drugged but you keep eating the free food?! I had been enjoying the story. It wasn't until the last tenth, where everything just rushed to a non-sensical conclusion, that I started to get annoyed. It wasn't a revenge plot and it wasn't about justice. At the end, like our protagonist Amelia asks, all this for what? What was the point? Character motivation provided didn't sell me on character action. All in all the ending felt rushed and I was let down. 2 stars from me.
The Last Resort was published December 01, 2020.
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