The murder of a famous director at his own birthday party seemed a recycled story line but Tess Little manages to put enough spin on the story that you'd not compare it to any other book. The victim's pet octopus is definitely a spin that left me trying to figure out how it would work into the story......i'm not telling. Eight selected guests at the party become the eight suspects of his murder. As the investigation continues, clues will lead unsuspecting readers in many directions and keep you guessing......maybe the octopus did it???? Read it and find out.

I am sorry for the inconvenience but I don’t have the time to read this anymore and have lost interest in the concept. I believe that it would benefit your book more if I did not skim your book and write a rushed review. Again, I am sorry for the inconvenience.

The description of the book gave all the right indications needed in a thriller-book. A mysterious birthday party for an ex-husband? Add in a pet octopus named Persephone, and its sure to make a reader wonder what does Persephone have to do with the murder that occurred?? And how will that all play out in a luxurious Los Angeles mansion. I wanted to really like this book, but it was a difficult read for me. Slow at times, and interesting at others, it just didn't tweak my thriller-appetite as needed. Although, I will say that this book is one that while some may not like it very much, there will be others that will really appreciate the nuances of past relationship and how to find the murderer. Thank you to NetGalley and Random House Publishing for the opportunity to read and review this advance reader copy. Opinions expressed in this review are completely my own. #NetGalley #TheLastGuest

I LOVE stories that revolve around the movies and/or Hollywood and this one had a locked-room element so I was doubly excited to read this one! Unfortunately, the characters fell a bit flat for me and the story just left me feeling blah.

I did not finish this book. I really hated all the characters and found myself completely uncaring when it came to who killed our pretentious guy. The voice overall did not appeal.

Very interesting book from the very first page to the very last page. It does move slow in parts but that just gives you time to think! Give this book a try, I’m sure you’ll like it! Thanks for writing such a interesting book!

A dinner party where someone is found dead? Say less. This is a trope that I will read again and again.

Overall, this one was not for me. I was hyped in the beginning with the appearance of the mysterious card, but the pacing was too slow for my liking, so I had a hard time keeping interested. I might have enjoyed it more with multiple POVs. It's an average book but not one I would recommend to a friend.

Thanks to Netgalley for the digital copy to review.

A birthday party in a glamorous Hollywood Hills mansion, Richard Bryant famous director and party host... also the one who ends up dead! Among the guests under suspicion is also his actress ex-wife Elspeth. Eight potential suspects for this whodunnit or was it all just perceived to be a whodunnit?! This was a lot more out f my wheelhouse then I anticipated. I would a slow burn but even a little slower than I would like to stay intrigued. Persephone Richard's pet octopus was a weirdly integrated part of the book for me and I still don't know how I feel about it. I couldn't fully connect with this book or even give much of a review as I'm still sitting here kind of confused with what I read. I would have to say this isn't really for me, but there were aspects I liked about the book with the glamorous setting and mostly the idea to it but it didn't hit enough on my radar to say it's a knockout suspense ride. Thank you NetGalley and Ballantine Books for the ARC copy to read and review.

3 stars.*

I am not sure why I let this title wilt in my queue but I did. It is the only book by Tess Little that I have ever read and I found it intriguing.

The Last Guest is essentially a locked-door mystery, wherein a famous director invites a curated group of guests to celebrate his 50th birthday and winds up dead. The story is told from the perspective of Elspeth, his ex-wife, who was invited to the party under the guise that she would be accompanying their grown daughter. However, for reasons she doesn't understand and doesn't figure out until nearly the end of the book, the daughter doesn't show up and the party goes from odd to bizarre then in a drunken and drugged-up frenzy it takes the ultimate dark turn.

Having finished and LOVED Remarkably Bright Creatures, I confess to being extra excited about the octopus and the potential of the octopus being the murderer.

Alas, I just wound up kind of hating all of the characters, not caring who did it and being annoyed. For the most part I enjoyed the book, but I didn't love it.

*with thanks to NetGalley for the digital ARC in exchage for this honest review.

Thanks NetGalley, Ballentine Books and author, Tess Little for advanced copy for honest review.

The Last Guest

Richard Bryant is well known in Hollywood. He is a famous movie producer who has made it in his time. It's his 50th birthday so he decides to invite 8 people that mean so much to him. In the morning Elspeth finds her ex-husband dead. Choked on his own vomit. There are eight reasons there, for some reason or another, that want him dead. This is a locked room mystery of a whodunnit.

Mystery, intrigue, and a mystery guest - what more could you want?

This story grips you at the beginning but starts to slow a bit. There’s a few questions that will linger in the back of your mind as you’re reading.

Nothing is as it seems and some things are impossible.

I say give it a shot and you may find yourself a new jewel .

The Last Guest by Tess Little has a strong concept and is reminiscent of Agatha Christie.

It's a whodunit where all of the guests are suspects, but it gets a bit bogged down within the crew of characters.

Many thanks to the author, publisher, and NetGalley for sharing this book with me. All thoughts are my own.

A solid debut novel, a thriller which is page-turning but the plot was lacking and there were too many characters to keep track of. Wasn’t what I wanted, but enjoyed the ride.

Despite the Agatha Christie influence, the too slow narrative bogged down pace and ultimately lost my interest. Grateful, still, to the author, Random House Publishing Group - Ballantine, and NetGalley for the ARC; opinions are mine.

I enjoyed this one as an audio book. I didn't really feel the star power of this story. It was easy to think of them as rich but not necessarily famous. I liked the twists, as the MC talks to her daughter and other suspects and slowly untangles her own confusing memories.

I liked that I just rolled with the story and didn't try to figure out who actually did it. I liked the information about the little octopus in the room and how Elsbeth seemed to use it to unfree herself of the memories and moments she'd crammed down, hidden, to forget.

My only grumble were the flashbacks. It may have been just because I was doing an audio and not reading, but they were jarring, with little to no warning you'd flipped back in time. It could happen mid page and then flip back and I found it took a while for me to get used to it.

But all in all, I liked this one. I liked the twist at the end and how it all came about.

A huge thank you to the author and publisher for providing an e-ARC via Netgalley. This does not affect my opinion regarding the book.

I was excited to read this, as it seemed like a twisty thriller with sinister aspects, not the least of which was the octopus. That sinister feeling remained, an unfamiliar house where there's no privacy or escape, no idea of who to trust even before a death occurs. But it isn't twisty or a thriller, it's almost sleepy in its anger and despair.

It's difficult to talk about what worked for me without talking about what didn't as they were tangled up in each other, so overall let me say: I enjoyed reading this, I read it pretty quickly, I am intrigued to read more by this author, but I wasn't satisfied at the end of the novel.

<spoiler>
I can tell I enjoyed the book because I was confused and unsure about so much for the whole book but I was willing to go along with it and wait for when the author meted out that information. That was more successful in some cases than others. The actual murder mystery solution was not satisfying to me. I think I would have been happier if it had more outright been "a test", after all, Richard went to great lengths to invite specific people, pick fights, keep his daughter from being there, plant evidence for each person, but then didn't really intend to overdose? I also could have been content with a more murder on the Orient Express solution, where they were ALL complicit, where everyone was awake and saw and nodded at each other to not move and help. Instead, it's neutered by making it clear that Elspeth and Honey were not involved at all, that Sabine wanted to help.

I was sort of hoping Persephone would play into the death more, that Elspeth's paranoia about her would pay off in even a small way. If she is only there for an aesthetic, as a metaphor for keeping something beautiful and fierce just to watch her and keep her locked away, then I wish it had been leaned into a bit more. I'm sort of left wondering if she actually escaped at night? We are meant to believe Honey and also she was playing with the rock as though she wanted to get out, so I guess the answer is yes, but then what does that mean? Could there be more explicit parallels between this and the time Elspeth tried to leave Richard but didn't? If they were closer together in the book, that might work, but as it is that attempt for Elspeth to escape is glossed over in favor of a longer section from the 40th birthday party where she did end up leaving.

And why was seeing him with Honey at that party such a revelation? I get that it reframes things for Elspeth, that maybe she <i>should</i> have warned Honey that Richard was an abusive partner, that he was 17 and needed protection and help, but like... 23 wouldn't have been better, you know? He's still very young and there's a huge power imbalance. Elspeth questioning if she let herself off the hook because Honey was a man and she didn't want to have to have that conversation, come off as jealous or bitter, revisit what had happened, is all probably accurate so I don't know why the recognition that he had slept with Honey then was so life changing for her. I thought a point was being made that Richard wasn't shooting up, he was cheating on her, and she would have stayed if it was cheating because he'd done it before, but she left because she thought it was drugs, and we were getting into the territory of "did she subconsciously lie to herself about viewing it as drug use as the final push to get out that door?" "should she have stayed as she stayed for cheating before, does she feel guilty for leaving?" and none of that rang true for me to the point where I would think "yes, this is the author's intention."
</spoiler>

I liked Elspeth as a character, and I certainly had empathy for her, the character flaws she had and mistakes she made felt very true, but she is a very passive character for a viewpoint protagonist. At the party she is constantly sitting by herself to get a moment of quiet and accidentally overhears things. Most of the police interrogations are skipped over, so much time is jumped or motivations skipped over (because the extent of the abuse is needed as a big reveal, sure), that it feels as though the meat of the book and the conflict have been excised and we're just left to read the connective tissue. It's an interesting way to format the book, but I don't think it had enough there to maintain the interest. I kept going because I thought there would be more pay off than we got. The ending point was good, exactly the right place to stop, but there was a "where are they now" bit right before it that went further into the future, and that was entirely unnecessary. I wanted a more twisty interesting solution to the puzzle and/or a more fulfilling emotional payoff for Elspeth (especially with her relationship with Lillie), and it was lukewarm for both.

I think this could have been a much better book with not too much change, and that's why it frustrates me.

This book was just not for me, I started it and just kept putting it down and thinking about other books. I couldn't get involved enough to ever finish reading.

THE LAST GUEST – by Tess Little

The opening paragraphs of the book immediately hooked me into this Whodunit, coupled with one very interesting guest, in particular, which had me at the edge of my seat.

How is this story going to play out?!?!

As the reader, submerged in the depths of a who’s who dinner party, wherein drinks and delicious detectable are aplenty—by dawn early light, there on the floor lay a dead body.

I Desperately Need to know how this story ends; unfortunately, the narrative lags quite a bit with the repetition of thought from our main character, Elspeth; as we are transported between intermittent present-day interrogation with law enforcement, events of the distant past commingled with what transpired during the dinner party.

At the beginning of Act II, around the fifty-three percent mark, the repetition continues, so I quickly lose interest in the narrative, no longer submerged, just bobbing on the surface.

My need to know what happens, however, hasn’t waned a bit, so I’m going to request an Audiobook from my local library and give this book another try.

Thank you, NetGalley and Ballantine Books (Random House), for providing me with an eBook of THE LAST GUEST in a request for an honest review.

Former actress, Elspeth Bell is at a very strange birthday part for her ex-husband, Hollywood director, Richard Bryant. The small guest list for the party is seemingly random until everyone wakes up the next morning to find Richard dead.

This story is for the fan of the locked room mystery. I felt that it did drag along at times, although the ending was not one I expected.

This was an OK mystery. I hesitated to read because I don't think comparing a debut to Agatha Christie shows the appropriate respect for Christie, and really just sets the debut author up for failure. The ending was not worth the ride to get there, in my opinion.


I received an advance copy. All thoughts are my own.