There was A LOT going on in this book. It may have flowed better with one less character or two. Lots of unlikable people doing lots of terrible things. It's entertaining, and kept me reading,

Thank you to the publisher and Net Galley for providing an ARC for my review.

Set during the grand opening on an exclusive island hotel, The Club is a multi-perspective locked-room mystery where someone is dead and everyone has a motive for the crime. Island Home, the newest Home Group luxury hotel, has been plagued by financial trouble and construction delays. Ned Groom, CEO of the Home Group, has devised a nefarious method of financing the new project. However, once guest begin to arrive on the island, everything begins to unravel.

Told from the perspectives of Jess, the Head of Housekeeping, Annie, the Head of Membership, Nikki, Ned’s personal assistant, and Adam Groom, Ned’s brother and right-hand man: Ellery Lloyd was able to develop unique characters with their own struggles and motivations. The novel begins with the disappearance of Ned Groom and you’ll spend your remaining time piecing together clues and revealing secrets that the characters don’t want each other to know. Everyone has a motive for murder and you’ll be left guessing until the very end.

Along with the multiple perspectives of the individuals who work for and around Ned Groom, the novel also contains interspersed Vanity Fair articles. I found this to be a creative way to add in background information to the story as the plot progresses forward. It helps to glean details that establish the story, as well as tie up loss ends after the weekend opening of Island Home reaches its catastrophic end.

Overall, I think that this is a vast improvement on their first novel, People Like Her. The secret lives and lies of celebrities are, personally, a far more entertaining concept to me than a novel about influencer moms. The plot can be difficult to follow when mixing in the different perspectives, as well as the news articles, the ending could not be more satisfying. If you’re a fan of Agatha Christie or Lucy Foley’s The Guest List, pick this one up.

Thank you to Harper for the Advanced Reader's Copy.

Intriguing premise for a book, but I found it hard to follow at times with the multiple POV. Some like able characters, and many twists and turns to keep me turning the pages!

I had heard a lot of mixed reviews on this one going in to the book so my expectations weren’t high. I enjoyed her last book, People Like Her so I had some hope but I did not like this one as much. It still had enough interest for me to finish but just didn’t get me as much satisfaction as the last one.

Synopsis:

Everyone's Dying to Join . . .

The Home Group is a glamorous collection of celebrity members' clubs dotted across the globe, where the rich and famous can party hard and then crash out in its five-star suites, far from the prying eyes of fans and the media.

The most spectacular of all is Island Home—a closely-guarded, ultraluxurious resort, just off the English coast—and its three-day launch party is easily the most coveted A-list invite of the decade.

But behind the scenes, tensions are at breaking point: the ambitious and expensive project has pushed the Home Group's CEO and his long-suffering team to their absolute limits. All of them have something to hide—and that's before the beautiful people with their own ugly secrets even set foot on the island.

As tempers fray and behavior worsens, as things get more sinister by the hour and the body count piles up, some of Island Home’s members will begin to wish they’d never made the guest list.

Because at this club, if your name’s on the list, you’re not getting out.

My thoughts:

The two brothers, Neal and Adam who ran the club were despicable. I wanted to like Adam but in the end I was unable to reconcile his actions. Three women are also at the heart of the story, Annie the PR guru, Nikki who has worked for the club for many years and was taken under Neals wing after finding herself over her head and Jess who took a job to exact her revenge on one of the members. I had sympathy for both Jess and Nikki because they had been wronged but Annie was only looking out for herself.

Read this if:
You enjoy celebrity drama
Rich people behaving badly
Women getting revenge for the wrongs men have inflicted upon them

Thanks to NetGalley and all for an ARC copy of this book in return for an honest review.
I really enjoyed the plot and twists and turns on this one. However I didn't feel that this had strong character development so I didn't feel connected.

This book was intriguing and suspenseful. It involved more than one crime including murder and blackmail. The story is told by the characters involved in the action. It is filled with many twists and turns. The more I read, the more I wanted to read. I highly recommend this book to other mystery readers.

This story was many POVs and also a time line that bounced around so you definitely had to be focused on the story or you would be lost. It took a bit to get to the meat of it but by the end I wanted to see the resolution. If you like celebrity gossip and the lifestyles of rich and famous then get this book. There was definitely some surprises at the end.

I apologize but I was not able to finish this book. I was in a different headspace at the time of requesting / recieving this book and the time I got it.

The Club was one of my most highly anticipated books of the year. It revolves around a dark mystery and winds together multiple perspectives and an array of characters with big secrets that they will do anything to keep hidden.

While I enjoyed the characters, they did start to cause a bit of confusion. Jess, Annie, and Nikki really started blending together for me towards the end of the story and that caused some of the building tension to burn out for me. There are about four perspectives in The Club but a ton of other characters, so enjoy the unwinding mystery but do keep in mind whose perspective you are getting, especially from the female characters, as you go along.

So I was a little disappointed in the book, I felt like it started of strong but for some reason got flat for me and at times I felt it dragging.. It also felt far fetched and predicable. I usually liked alternate points of view but in this case it became confusing for me and thought there were way more categories than necessary.

Sending a thank you to NetGalley for an early release for my honest opinion.

The Club was a book filled with characters with interwoven histories. The success of The Club has dark roots and once they surface no ones past is safe. It was an interesting and unexpected storyline.

An enjoyable but dark mystery.
Many thanks to Harper and to NetGalley for providing me with a galley in exchange for my honest opinion.

The Club is full of secrets, lies, twists, and turns.......nothing is as it seems. Lots going on in this book and a lot of back and forth between different story lines. Keeps you on toes. Enjoyed the book.

The Club is a fun, twisty suspense that keeps you engaged and on your toes the whole time. I really enjoyed the alternating POV of the different main characters and found it easy to follow each storyline. It was a little predictable at times but the writing was fast paced. This is a fun, summer read that is easy to enjoy.

📚 #BOOKREVIEW 📚
The Club by Ellery Lloyd
⭐️⭐️⭐️ / Pages: 320 / Genre: Fiction

The Club is about The Home Group, which is an exclusive ultraluxurious resort that caters to A-list celebrities. It’s all wild fun and games for the rich and famous until guests start turning up dead.

The idea is good but the main characters are all so spoiled and insufferable, I lost interest fast. It wasn’t bad but it wasn’t great. I’m kind of surprised it was a Reese’s Book Club pick. A low three stars for me.

Thank you @NetGalley for the advance copy of this book.

The Home Group is a collection of resort-type clubs around the world where only the most exclusive celebrities and rich can get in. It’s considered an honor to be granted a Home Group membership. Owners Ned and Adam are opening up the newest club on an island off the coast of England, which is supposed to be the most grandiose out of them all. Unfortunately the opening is not going as smooth as Ned and Adam are hoping. Tensions between the brothers flair, as well as with the staff. It’s clear there is a money shortage and this grand opening is only sucking them even drier.  This new club could either make them or break them. Once the celebrities arrive and the dead bodies start piling up, it appears there might just be something more sinister at play in The Home Group.

The characters in this book were hit and miss for me. There were so many different POVs that it was difficult to connect with the characters. I would say the main cast consisted of about 4-5 characters, but despite them being the primary focus of the book, their voices tended to get lost amidst the extremely full cast of characters.

Annie is the gatekeeper of The Home Group. No one is admitted without Annie’s say and she loves being groveled to. She is incredibly vain and self-centered with a deadly ambition. Basically, she’s a terrible person. Then there is Jess who has finally been hired to work at The Home Group after years of applying, but does she have an ulterior motive for wanting to work there? Adam is part owner of The Home Group. His brother Ned runs the place and won’t let Adam forget it. Has Ned finally pushed Adam too far? And then there is Nikki. Nikki is beautiful and has been working for The Home Group for forever. As the assistant to Ned, she basically keeps everything running and smoothes everything over between Ned and the staff. But are there some things that Nikki can’t smooth over and what secrets has she been keeping to herself?

The Club is a slow burn of a mystery where deaths and motivations are slowly revealed bit by bit. The author (or rather authors as this is a husband and wife writing duo working under the pen name Ellery Lloyd) does a nice job of giving us pieces of the puzzle throughout the novel before finally clicking it all in place at the end. The first half of this book is really slow. Like really really slow. But fortunately it picks up during the second half, which made me rate it a little higher.

Overall I felt that this book missed the mark for me. It had all the trappings of a good suspense novel, but it fell a bit flat. There were way too many characters to keep track of and it got a bit messy to follow at times. Although there were a couple good twists I didn’t expect, I felt like most of the twists were kind of predictable. This wasn’t really an edge of your seat thriller, but more of a whodunit mystery. It’s still worth a read and there were many people who really loved it. I’ve heard great things about their other novel, People Like Her, and I have no hesitations about giving that one a read as well. Also, the cover design on this book was a slam-dunk! Absolutely gorgeous!

Rating: 3.5/5

This was a fun mystery that started off slowly and just kept picking up steam. I actually prefer that in my mysteries because it gives me time to try and work out the character's motivations. I loved the setting and the exclusive atmosphere with people behaving badly and I thought it had a few interesting twists. The narrator, Tamaryn Payne, did an amazing job bringing voice to the story.

DNF’d this one at 20% in. Felt the formatting was unorganized, the characters weren’t interesting, and the chapters were so long I would forget which I was on, and what POV I was reading.

The Club by Ellery Lloyd is a combination of a locked-room (locked-island) mystery, lifestyles of the rich and unaccountable and murder most foul. The titular club is a chain of high end hotels, Club-insert location here, that is having it's grand opening on a remote British island that is somewhat disconnected from the mainland by a causeway that floods over for a good chunk of the day. We learn about some of the new staff, the owners of the hotel chains and several of the big name celebrities that are attending the over the top opening weekend. Then things go waaayyyy of the rails and you wind up with several dead people, insane arguments and motives that are all over the map. I want to say that the author lost their way while plotting, but it actually led to an overall impression of just over the top antics of celebrities, the wealthy and those that serve them. All in all, this was a fun quick read, just don't overthink it too much. Thanks to Harper & NetGalley for the free e-book.

I had such high hopes for this one because it as obsessssssed with the cover. But with so many perspectives, i got too confused and couldnt get past it.