Kati

Thanks to NetGalley for the ARC!

5 sparkly stars! It's always great when you finish a book and feel the need to silently stare at a wall for 10 minutes after because you don't know what to do with yourself now.

There's some gorgeous writing in this and an infuriating countdown. What more do you want?

This is a favourite of the year. Stuart Turton remains one of my all-time favourite authors. He made me enjoy an environmental dystopia that has hints of climate scifi, a subgenre I usually don't like at all!

I can't say much about this book since I believe the less you know about this author's novels, the more fun you'll have. What I will say is that, although The Last Murder at the End of the World shares some characteristics with his previous books—namely, that they are all mysteries featuring a small number of core characters who are surrounded by a larger cast and they all have lengthy titles—it is also, once again, a completely different book compared to the other things Stuart Turton has written. In the same way that The Seven Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle and The Devil and the Dark Water are very different books!

Basically, if you love how Stuart Turton builds his stories, you won't be disappointed. If what he does is not your cup of tea, then I'm not sure this will work for you.

Personally, I can't wait for his next book! And with all due respect, please write faster, sir.

Thanks to NetGalley for the ARC!

1 star. I didn't enjoy this book at all and parts of it made me angry. Not the fun, popcorn thriller I was expecting to read. Very unpleasant.

I hated how the thematic content was incorporated into the story and repeated over and over again. Family, parents and children, pregnancies, rape and victim blaming. None of these were well handled and I was surprised that this was even what the book was about! The blurb gave the impression of a story about three couples and their friendships. This is not that book. A strange importance was put upon blood relations and children being a vital part of a complete and happy life. I didn't enjoy that at all. And everyone had either tragically lost their parents or couldn't connect with them. Everyone.

I also hated all of the characters and disliked spending time with them. They were all miserable. The gender dynamics weren't great either, with all the men obsessed with work and all the women only caring about family and children. And those are the only character traits they possess.

A large part of the book deals with the results of DNA testing kits. Which isn't even hinted at in the description. Not a word about ancestry research, even though it is a topic that's brought up in the very first chapter!

On top of all of that, it takes forever for anything to happen once they've reached the cabin. Some characters are off on their own for large sections of the book and because they don't have a POV, they disappear until they are needed again for the story to progress. While other characters, whose POVs we are reading from, are completely inconsequential to the story. It's incredibly clunky and the book overall is very boring for a thriller. And so repetitive!

This is the second book by the author that I have read (“Confessions on the 7:45” being the other and 4 stars) and both have a strange subtext of disliking social media and technology without reason. It's very odd.

I had been looking forward to reading this book a lot, but was sadly very disappointed.

Thanks to NetGalley for the ARC!

1 star. What a struggle to get through. Messy teen drama in a supposedly adult thriller package.

Every single character sounds and acts like a whiny teenager from a mediocre YA novel. Be that the attendees of the writing retreat, who are in their mid-twenties to early thirties or the famous author host, who is in her mid-fifties. Every one of them was annoying to no end. Also, the characters' ages make no sense, considering their backstories. Several of them can't be the age the book tells us they are, unless they are all secretly time travellers.

All of the dialogue is weird, awkward and unnatural. Which is also true for the random sex dreams that are thrown into the mix and the odd descriptions of breasts and nipples. And every single item of clothing is described in tedious detail. The characters also seem to think that the name Poppy is the most exotic and uncommon name that they have ever encountered... another example of the strange writing choices. And let's not even talk about the historical fiction novel that one character is writing and the very many current-day expressions used in that book-within-a-book.

The blurb-promised snow storm doesn't occur until more than halfway through. There is almost no plot and what little there is, makes no sense, is incredibly obvious and just feels like messy teen drama most of the time. The first half of the book reads like a weird attempt at a gothic novel, only to turn into a strange attempt at horror in the second. Neither work.

I was so excited to read this book, but unfortunately, I only ended up being relieved that it was finally over by the end.

Thanks to NetGalley for the ARC!

A high 2 stars. Fun to read, but in the end, not worth the effort!

This is an incredibly slow and sometimes choppy book. The story starts and stops a lot. Nothing really happens and while there is an attempt made at building some kind of tension, it sadly doesn't succeed at all. At no point did the text convey the feeling of danger the protagonist was apparently experiencing.

This very messy family wasn't as fun as it could have been, as the characters were very flat. The relationship dynamics and the way everyone behaved made no sense. The protagonist and her actions were incredibly irritating, her thought processes were very repetitive and the central relationship, the one with her partner, wasn't believable at all.

The promised plot didn't really start until 80% into the book. Those last 20% could have made for a fun thriller if they had taken up and been spread out over the entire novel.

I found the blurb to be incredibly misleading. It implies that this book is focused on a deadly game, which it isn't at all, in my opinion. It's about a pregnant woman deciding if she wants to be a part of this wealthy family or not, while dealing with her own past. Also, most of the plot points mentioned in the descriptions don't come into play until almost halfway through the book, with some elements only being introduced almost at the end!

I had an enjoyable time reading it. And while it was very engaging and I wasn't bored, I was mostly waiting for something to happen. For there to be more to the story. For it all to actually make sense. There was clearly a lot of potential. But I was just very frustrated by the end.