Review: The Last Guest

The Last Guest by Tess Little
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

This book is a re-issued copy of "The Octopus," which was published in 2020.

If overly complicated literature is your forte, then you may love this book. However, I found it to be a tedious read and nearly gave up at the 50% mark. The characters, well, I just don't know what to say about them. The leading male voice, Richard, seems to be evil personified. The female protagonist, Elspeth, is a weak-willed, spineless twit. The rest of the people at this birthday party seem to be nearly redundant until you get near the end of the book.

The timeline shifts from the party to the past and back to the present but in totally different scenarios. I found this makes for a difficult read until I got used to figuring out which scenario they were in. I hated wasting my reading time like that!

The ending, well, you could almost see it coming since a big deal has been made of this book being like an Agatha Christie novel. (I won't spoil this read for you by telling you which book this paralleled.)

This book would have been a thoroughly satisfying read for me if the author hadn't tried so hard but was just slightly off the mark.

*ARC supplied by The author, the publisher, and NetGalley.

#NetGalley #BallentineBooks #TessLittle #AgthaChristie #lockeddoormurder

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SYNOPSIS: "A glamorous birthday dinner in the Hollywood Hills ends with the famous host dead and every guest under suspicion in this dark, cinematic suspense debut reminiscent of an Agatha Christie page-turner crossed with David Lynch's Mulholland Drive.

When actress Elspeth Bell attends the fiftieth birthday party of her ex-husband Richard Bryant, the Hollywood director who launched her career, all she wants is to pass unnoticed through the glamorous crowd in his sprawling Los Angeles mansion. Instead, there are just seven other guests--and Richard's pet octopus, Persephone, watching over them from her tank as the intimate party grows more surreal (and rowdy) by the hour. Come morning, Richard is dead--and all of the guests are suspects.

In the weeks that follow, each of the guests come under suspicion: the school friend, the studio producer, the actress, the actor, the new partner, the manager, the cinematographer, and even Elspeth herself. What starts out as a locked-room mystery soon reveals itself to be much more complicated, as dark stories from Richard's past surface, colliding with Elspeth's memories of their marriage that she vowed never to revisit. Elspeth begins to wonder not just who killed Richard, but why these eight guests were invited, and what sort of man would desire to possess a creature as mysterious and unsettling as Persephone.

The Last Guest is a stylish exploration of power--the power of memory, the power of perception, the power of one person over another. "