by Hannah Richell
SYNOPSIS
Five old friends.
One glamping weekend.
A storm that will change everything.
Max and Annie Kingsley have left the London rat race to set up a glamping site in the wilds of Cornwall. They invite old university friends – TV star Dominic, doctor and new mum Kira, and free-spirited Jim and Suze – and their children for a trial weekend but the reunion quickly veers off-course.
First, there’s The Incident around the campfire on the first night. The following afternoon, a storm quickly develops off the rugged North Coast. When one of their group goes missing, all hell breaks loose. And as the winds batter the bell-tents, emotions run high and tension mounts for all the characters.
Who is lying in hospital, who has gone missing and who is the body on the beach below the cliffs . . .?
REVIEW
The premise of The Search Party is one that I've read several times before. We have a group of old friends from University who decide to meet up for a glamping weekend away as they have been drifting apart recently. Life has taken the friends in different directions - relationships, children, careers - this weekend is a chance to reclaim the fun they used to have when the met twenty years earlier. However, while a storm gradually breaks, one bad decision leads to devastating consequences for the group.
Despite having read stories with similar concepts, there were two brilliant things about this book which, in my opinion, made it really stand out from these other thrillers;
The characters in The Search Party were fantastic. If, in order to keep the mystery of who was involved in the crime, the characters are all given complicated back stories and motives for the incidents which take place, I just end up not particularly liking any of the people in the story and not caring about the resolution. In this case, there were obviously things coming up from the past, but I genuinely felt invested in the 'Search' and wanted a good outcome for the people involved. I don't know if it was because there were also children involved, but I honestly felt every bit of tension and desperation in the story which is something that doesn't always come through strongly for me.
The structure and plotting of the story was perfect. I just loved the format of this book and thought it was so successful in keeping my intrigue the whole way through. The book begins with the aftermath of an incident - we know that the police are involved and that at least one person has ended up in hospital in a serious condition - however, we don't know what happened or who was involved. The rest of the book goes right back to the beginning of the glamping weekend where the story is gradually pieced together from several different viewpoints and timelines.
This is the first book I've read from Hannah Richell but I absolutely loved it. It was so clever and managed to mix the raw emotion and more 'thriller' type tension brilliantly. I wasn't expecting to get so involved in the story but I was totally hooked. The strength of this story really came from the structure and plotting, all of the secrets and revelations came at exactly the right points in the narrative, I can't fault it. An easy five stars!
Thanks to Random Things Tours - @RandomTTours, Hannah Richell - @hannahrichell and Simon & Schuster - @simonschusterUK for the opportunity to read and review.
Publisher: Simon & Schuster UK Genre: Psychological Thriller / Domestic Thriller
ISBN: 978-1398527959
Pages: 400pp
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