by Simon Lelic
A missing girl. Five friends. Who will survive…
Sadie Saunders has been missing for a week, everybody thinks she has been murdered, and the suspicion falls on her boyfriend Mason.
Together with Mason, Sadie's brother and best friends vow to find out the truth and form a search party in the woods where Sadie was last seen.
Two days later the police receive a frantic call for help, one of the group has not survived and it is left to Detective Inspector Robert Fleet and his partner DS Nicola Collins to piece together the information to try and uncover the truth about what happened in the woods and to finally discover what led to Sadie’s disappearance.
I loved the Search Party by Simon Lelic. I found the style of writing very unusual – the police interviews with the group of friends only showed their side of the conversation leaving it up to the reader to fill in the other side. This took a while to get used to but eventually I found that it gave the story a modern ‘reality show’ feel. It was almost as if they were diary entries rather than interviews, and I thought this would work well as a TV series.
As I was reading I decided that I had worked out what had happened several times, and each time – as more information came out – I realised that I was wrong. There were so many twists and turns, the difficulty was trying to decide who was lying, what they were hiding from the police (and their friends), and why. As the story had lots of characters and different backstories, I could see it going in a few different directions and even though by the end I had worked out who was involved, I hadn’t guessed the exact circumstances or the final outcome.
I read the whole book over two days as the tension kept building throughout the story and I got to the point where I couldn’t leave it without finding out what was going to happen in the end. I didn’t find the story especially creepy but it definitely gripped my attention, had a great atmosphere and some interesting characters - I would highly recommend it.
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