The description of this book seemed right up my street. I did enjoy it - I did wonder during the first few chapters if it was going to be a young adult book, but there were lots of twists and turns and it kept my interest. Would recommend.
#NetGalley#TheSearchParty

I really enjoyed this book and the format in which it was written! The characters were all very well crafted and the dynamics worked! There was suspense throughout with almost 2 separate cases intrinsically linked!

Very gripping read, with an easy reading style!! Would recommend!

Sadie has gone missing and her friends form a search party, convinced the police are looking in the wrong place. Rob Fleet, the detective brought in to lead the search, is convinced the friends are hiding something. Then someone is dead. Was Fleet right?
A really fast paced read that you need to make sure you can devote time to: you won’t be able to put it down.
The story has multiple narratives with Fleet’s side being told in 3rd person narrative whilst the teenagers relate their story through 1st person one sided interviews. However, all the voices are distinctive and easy to follow. It becomes clear quite quickly that everyone in this novel has some demons they are dealing with and many are not telling the truth about events. Whilst this has the potential to become confusing Lelic handles the plot expertly, resulting in a simple, easy to follow plot with a genuinely surprising twist.
I hadn’t read any books by Simon Leticia before but I will definitely go back and read his previous novels. If you haven’t come across this author before, The Search Party is a great place to start.
Many thanks to the publisher and Netfalley for the opportunity to read this book.

A girl Sadie goes missing , after the police are involved, and fail to find her , 5 of her friends organise a search party to find her but are any of these friends hiding anything ?A further tragedy unfolds as they search .A good story with a number of twists but unfortunately at times , when the teenage friends were giving their accounts of what happened it read like Young Adult genre style of writing which detracted from the overall sense of the book .

I received an ARC of this book from net galley. I requested it, having thoroughly enjoyed The Liar's Room. I am a bit more ambivalent about this one. Sadies is missing, the police and community are searching the river and woods to try and find her. 5 Of her friends and family, all aged around 16, decide to form their own search party in the woods but are they alone and do they all return. The narrative is the recounting of what happened from the eyes of the people in the search party. These narratives are almost monologues heard by the police as they investigate what happens. For me it had similarities to One of Us Is Lying but with less clarity. There were times when there seemed to be gaps at others leaps in the police's problem solving that just didn't make sense.

I liked the MC Police inspector - Fleet but dislike the prototypical superintendent who wants to just get the investigation done irrespective of whether it is the right person they catch.

I thought The House was excellent, edge of the seat stuff, but I am afraid this did not live up to my expectations. 5 teenagers form a search party to find their missing friend. I found the way the story was presented was confusing and not realistic, and the characters weren't believable.
Thanks to Netgalley and Penguin for an ARC copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

A cracking piece of escapism. Read it through to the wee small hours and am looking forward to handselling it. Loved the twists and red herrings.

Brilliant. This book takes different POV and different timelines and brings them all together into a suspense filled, tense thriller. The group of friends that strike out to find their missing friends soon descend into a whirlpool of distrust as fear and paranoia sets in and runs rampant throughout. Supposed friends start to look at each other with fearful eyes. Who is telling the truth, who if any of them killed Sadie. Can the detective in charge D I Rob Fleet who has his own Buried secret get to the bottom of the disappearance . Will justice prevail or will the fear and distrust within the group get the better of all involved. A dark, gritty book which will keep you hooked into devouring it in one session. Will keep you in suspense as to the culprit , a culprit and ending that will just be jaw dropping in its revelation.

An interesting theme for a book which started well but became a bit long winded in parts, mainly when the teenage friends were working their way through the woods looking for Sadie or evidence of what may have happened to her. I did find it dragged a bit in places but the character of Rob was excellent and added further interest to the story. Not really a page turner for me.

This book had me gripped from the beginning. Started and finished in one afternoon.

Sadie is missing and DI Rob Fleet is on the case to find her. From the outset, you’re never sure who to trust as there are so many gaps in each of the characters stories! Sadie’s friends Mason, Cora, Fash and Abi all seem to say things that just don’t entirely add up and have reasons which could implicate each of them in her disappearance. However, none of them are that solid.

As Simon Lelic progresses the story and the reader finds out more about the night of Sadie’s disappearance, it becomes more difficult to put the book down. However, the assumptions about each character’s involvement keep building.

The end was not one I expected after the twists and turns throughout but I thoroughly enjoyed it.

Thanks to NetGalley and Penguin Random House for the ARC!

Loved the premise for this thriller!

Sadie Saunders has been missing for a week. Everyone thinks she's dead - and that they know who killed her. But her 5 best friends still aren't sure so they go out together into the woods to find out the truth, some with intentions more honourable than others!

This is kind of a locked room mystery, but a "locked-woods" mystery. You know it had to be one of the friends, but who was it? It was a quick, racy plot that kept you going all the way to the end. Fun and quite a light-read.

The one thing that kind of jarred for me was the age of the characters. It did actually feel more YA than adult, but there were parts that seems more adult than YA. Maybe Lelic has created a new genre?.

I think this would make a perfect beach thriller!

I have enjoyed Simon Lelic’s previous novels and the premise of ‘The Search Party’ sounded promising. Five teenagers spend a couple of days in a local forest trying to track down missing Sadie: sister, friend, girlfriend. She is the smartest of the group and much loved by her family. Nobody in the locality knows why she has gone but many have their suspicions, aided and abetted by social media. Not only does the search party return home without Sadie; by the time that they do, her brother is also dead. What happened?
The story is told mainly through the voices of the five teenagers as they are interviewed in the police station. Perhaps the most interesting and complex character in the novel is DI Rob Fleet, originally from the same town that is now the centre of a missing person hunt. He was a troubled teenager and has carved a successful career through sheer strength of character. His understanding of the family dynamic and the teenagers’ volatile relationships comes in part from his own past.
Whilst the final revelations are just about credible, the novel is not as tightly written as I would have expected. There’s a huge amount of wandering round the woods retold from different perspectives which does become slightly tedious. Does Lelic want to immerse his readers in the narrative by allowing them to suffer the same ennui as his group of hunters? This doesn’t seem a very plausible argument. Whilst it’s not a novel to totally disregard, it neither moves at a cracking pace nor allows the reader to fully appreciate the individual characters, DI Fleet excepted. Not a bad read; just not a great one.
My thanks to NetGalley and Viking Penguin Books UK for a copy of this novel in exchange for a fair review.

This was such an interesting read as it goes from the perspective of 4 suspects as though you're in the interview room with them, which I felt was a creative way of going through the story. It also follows the detective inspector on the case as he listens to the accounts of the suspects and how he pieces together what actually happened. Definitely recommend reading this book.

Unfortunately I just couldn’t get into this book. Other readers may enjoy it more than I did, but the story was not original enough, and the stream of conversation of the teenage police interviews was annoying. I liked Fleet as a detective,I wish there had been more of this thread, less of the teenagers.

DI Rob Fleet has returned to the town he grew up in to lead the search for teenager Sadie Saunders. So far the search has found her bag and her coat but no other sign of her. Then five other teenagers go missing. Three of them, Cora, Fash and Abi are Sadie’s friends, Mason is her boyfriend and Luke is her twin brother. When they are found some three days later one young person is dead. The group claim they had formed a search party to look for Sadie as they didn’t think the police were looking in the right place. DI Fleet isn’t so sure that they are being totally truthful as each of them could have a motive for killing Sadie and he’s convinced they are hiding something. Fleet has his own issues to deal with as left the town after his younger sister died and some of the residents think he has a grudge.

Really great read through the teenagers responses to the police questions. Keeps you guessing as what has happened right to the end. Five stars from me.

Thanks to Netgalley, Penguin Random House and Simon Lelic for the ARC of this book in return for an honest review.

I attempted to read this book a few times and ended up skimming it to get to the end (which I also found disappointing). Not a book I will remember... As others have said, the voices of the teenagers are irritating at time and they really do go on. This is will written and in no way ‘amateurish’, it just wasn’t for me. Perhaps I needed to be in a different mood to read it?!

Thank you for the advanced copy and I’m glad to see lots of other people have enjoyed it!

Really enjoyed this book. Told from the POV if several characters it buoot the tension and suspense well. The reveal was shock that I didn't see coming. Great book, well written.

Sadie Saunders has been missing for a week. Everyone thinks she's dead - and that they know who killed her. But her friends aren't sure, and together they sneak out into the woods where Sadie's personal items were found. But one of them isn't telling the truth about their intentions...and the search party maybe isn't searching for Sadie after all...

I absolutely loved the previous Simon Lelic novel I read so I was really excited for this one, and although I did enjoy it, it fell a little flat for me. A lot of the chapters are supposed to be verbatim accounts from the teenagers in their police interviews, which just didn't work - to capture the conversations and events in the woods, they were recalling everything, word for word, and speaking like a novel's author would, not a teenager,so it lacked credibility. I also found it hard to distinguish between the teenage characters as they were very cardboard-cutout.

I did like the story of the detectives threaded through the narrative, and it was well written, but the reveal wasn't worth all the build up. A solid read but there was nothing particularly exciting about it.

Thank you to NetGalley, who provided me with a free ARC copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

Not my favourite book of this year and not one that will stand out to me as remembering I have read it. Wasn’t keen on how the teenagers acted, it felt a bit forced and unrealistic. Plot very similar to other books out there.

It was well written though and the characterisation was good, I just felt it was lacking something a bit different.

Police thriller with an unusual bunch of characters and lots of twists and misdirection. Like the search party I kind of got lost along the way.