The Last Party by Clare Mackintosh @BooksSphere @claremackint0sh #bloggersbuybooks #bookreview #paperbackbooks

 

The Last Party by Clare Mackintosh

Published by Sphere Books (an imprint of Little, Brown Book Group

Publication Date: 4th August 2022 (hardback)

Book Description:

On New Year's Eve, Rhys Lloyd has a house full of guests.

His lakeside holiday homes are a success, and he's generously invited the village to drink champagne with their wealthy new neighbours. This will be the party to end all parties.

But not everyone is there to celebrate. By midnight, Rhys will be floating dead in the freezing waters of the lake.

On New Year's Day, DC Ffion Morgan has a village full of suspects.

The tiny community is her home, so the suspects are her neighbours, friends and family - and Ffion has her own secrets to protect.

With a lie uncovered at every turn, soon the question isn't who wanted Rhys dead . . . but who finally killed him.

In a village with this many secrets, a murder is just the beginning.

My Thoughts:

I am a big fan of Clare Mackintosh's writing since I read her early book "I Let You Go", but somehow this one managed to wait on my shelf a good six months before I finally managed to get to it (sorry Clare!).  I love the cover design, which is one reason I am so surprised that it took me such a long time to read it - I am a bit of a "cover judge" and will often be swayed to buy/pick up a book purely because of its beauty. I also like when there is a map of the area covered in the book (tick!) and this time I found the author's list of cast members particularly useful. There are quite a few people introduced in a short time and having that list as reference at the start of the book really helped me.

The scene is set around Llyn Drych, a lake on the border of England and Wales and the nearby village of Cwm Coed - don't worry about how to pronounce these Welsh place names, there are handy pronunciation references along the way, and I found that because they're a bit tricky for us English folks it helped reinforce the sense of a divide between the English side of the lake and the Welsh side. Hostilities run deep between some of the locals and the residents of the new resort, named The Shore, which sits on the English bank of the lake.  The fact that the developer happens to be a long-time resident of the Welsh village only helps to underpin the locals' resentment that the resort even came into existence.

Rhys Lloyd grew up in Cwm Coed but shot to fame after being discovered in a local Eistedfodd, or music festival. His fame changed his life completely, although whether this was for the better is debatable after he is found floating in the lake on New Year's Day following the opening party for The Shore. This was the point I first found the cast list useful, as residents and villagers are introduced in quick-fire succession. 

Local detective Ffion Morgan is drafted in from the Welsh constabulary to investigate, and there's only one person as shocked as she is when her English counterpart Leo Brady signs in as the English contingent on the case.  It appears it's not the first time they've met...

With such a large cast and so many secrets held within Cwm Coed over decades, if not centuries, of small-town friendships and gossip, there are lots of opportunities for the author to plant red herrings and to smoke screen who is responsible for maybe having a hand in Rhys's demise, and indeed who could be trying to protect him when he was unable to defend himself. One of the characters points out that you're not considered to be a local until you have at least four generations laid to rest in the local graveyard, so the detectives' job of solving the case was never going to be easy. The simmering relationship between the two detectives is another thread to the storyline and I enjoyed seeing how the two worked around the elephant in the room whilst remaining professional and getting the job done.

There are many layers to this storyline and it's easy to get so engrossed that you lose track of time. The writing flows so easily off the pages. The main characters have plenty of depth to them and I grew to love a few of them as much as I continued to dislike some of the others along the way.

Personally, I give this book a strong 4-star review, the last star missing due to the large cast list which at times made the story feel a little too busy.

About the Author:

Clare Mackintosh is a police officer turned crime writer, and the multi-award-winning author of six Sunday Times bestselling novels. Translated into forty languages, her books have sold more than two million copies worldwide and have spent a combined total of sixty-six weeks in the Sunday Times bestseller chart. Clare lives in North Wales with her husband and their three children. For more information visit Clare’s website http://www.claremackintosh.com or find her at http://www.facebook.com/ClareMackWrites or on Twitter @ClareMackint0sh