I do not review thrillers often and I am not sure how to do so without spoiling, but this was just not the thriller for me. There were too many characters, the plot was a bit convoluted, and the twist was just NOT IT for me. I think that the author has writing talent, but I did not enjoy this book much.

This book was so tough to get through with such a slow build. It was extremely wordy, too many characters and I almost DNF. The ending shocked me a bit, but not enough for me to love it.

It took me quite awhile to get into this book, there were lots of characters and lots of details that didn't feel important, but then it took off and captured my interest. Who was killed and why, lots of suspects, lots of motives and revenge. Who will come out the club unscathed?

A story featuring fictional "celebrated people, none of whom are likeable, most of whom we luv to hate.
Well-plotted with lots of twists & connections. Lots of descriptive writing--really sets the mood, location and surroundings.
With great thanks to NetGalley & HarperCollins for this ARC!

I enjoyed People like her so i was excited for this one and im happy to say i actually enjoyed this one more! Reading about the rich and famous is a guilty pleasure especially those with secrets! This gave me a very "knives out" agatha christie vibe. I will say this was a slow burn, the payoff being the last 1/3 of the book.

Def recommending this to my friends

4/5

Full review closer to publication date!

I'd like to thank the publisher,Harper and Netgalley for providing me with a copy in exchange for an honest review.

It was really slow to get interesting and it was a slow burn.I didn’t connect to characters and it reminded of an Agatha Christie locked room type novel . There are some twists and turns so it’s not all predictable. I think many people will like it .

Home is the club to be a part of. It only accepts the most famous of celebrities, and even if you are a member, the kick off parties for their new locations only allow for a small fraction of their members to come. This is their biggest launch yet, the entire Home island. The party doesn’t exactly go off without a hitch however.

Ahh celebrities behaving badly at an exclusive club with no phones or cameras allowed. What could possibly go wrong? Well, just about everything, I suppose! I could not put this book down, I needed to put all the puzzle pieces together, and there were plenty of puzzle pieces to connect! I found this to be an enjoyable thriller!

This book is so much fun for any fans of things like the White Lotus or just celebrity culture. I loved how the book is told through shifting characters and news reports. Ellery Lloyd continues to not miss.

I was hooked from the start with the faux Vanity Fair article setting up the murder mystery to follow. Of course one half of the writing duo is a former content director of UK Elle and editorial director at Soho House. This book is OK Magazine meets Agatha Christie meets Soho House Mustique Island - in all the juiciest can't-put-down-this-page-turner ways you can imagine. Its March 1 publication is a little early for 'beach read' season, but this a perfect vacay thriller.

I received a digital pre-publication copy of this book in exchange for an honest review, and I'll be featuring it in a round-up of Murder Mystery Weekend Reads.

What an utterly delicious novel showing the precarious position one may find themselves in even in the most glamorous of surroundings! A treat!

The Club is a locked-room murder mystery taking place at the exclusive grand opening of a new location for Home Group, a thinly-veiled fictional version of Soho House.

What I liked:
-I enjoyed trying to guess who each celebrity was a real-life composite of.
-While this is a story about the excesses of the ultra rich and famous, I felt it poked fun at the concept of celebrity and the ridiculous obsession society oftentimes has with unremarkable people (i.e. The Royals, Housewives, The Kardashians, etc).
-The fake Vanity Fair article was a nice touch. The inclusion was reminiscent of one of my favorite novels, Night Film, which also included news' publications.

What I didn't like:
-I didn't mind the numerous narrators but there were way too many secondary characters. I would often forget who I was reading about and had to read a few paragraphs in order to remember who was who and how they were tied into the plot.
-It could have been more condensed as I was getting bored with the overly descriptive and repetitive parts.

TW: statutory rape, murder

This book is really a series of mysteries heightened by frequently shifting perspectives, making it feel fresh in the saturated mystery/thriller genre. I'm wary of thrillers that feel too formulaic and utilize tropes because there are so many around right now, but The Club managed to set itself apart for me.

The eponymous club is an island retreat for the ultra rich and ultra famous, so exclusive that the competition to be invited to it's opening weekend is fierce. Once on the island, the accommodations are luxe and booze and drugs abound. Things start to go sideways pretty fast.

Structurally, I thought the book was really well done. The use of 4-5 narrators could have been disjointed, but I thought it kept the pacing fast, and each perspective gave different clues about what might have happened. In addition, the story is interspersed with news articles about the events, which always provided some interesting puzzle piece. Maybe some might guess what happens before the end, but I really wasn't one of that group. It kept my attention the whole way through.

There is also some good commentary on celebrity, violence, and justice, and readers who follow celebrities on instagram or read about them will absolutely not want to pass this book up.

I received an eARC copy of this book via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review. This does not affect my opinion of the book or the content of my review.

Welcome to Island Home, the most exclusive club in the world. Island Home caters to the rich & the famous, the celebrities of the Arts. Artists, musicians, movie actors, TV actors, you can find them here. Whatever one desires, they will get it for you. Your happiness is their pleasure.

The launch of Island Home will be spectacular. Ned Groom, the owner, has invited the best of his clients: a famous artist, a movie star and his starlet wife, and a well-known talk show host, to be the first to enjoy the pleasures of the remote island. Nothing is going to ruin this weekend for Ned. Nothing. He has a fabulous surprise for each of his favorite celebrity clients, something they will remember for a long time to come.

The weekend starts off with a bang, lots of drinking and drugs. Ned takes each of his guests one at a time aside to present them with their surprise. And what a surprise it is! Ned is not only increasing his rates astronomically, he expects each of these men to pay up. Ned is cold and ruthless with his guests; likewise, he treats those in his inner circle of employees with disdain. At the height of the evening, Ned is elated while everybody else wishes him dead. But does anyone have the gumption to do it?

As I read this book, a song kept going through my head, The Hotel California by the Eagles …” you can check in anytime you want, but you can never leave. “ The beginning of this book was a bit slow but then it takes off like a rocket. Stick with it, you won’t be disappointed. The characters are so deliciously decadent and selfish.
I felt like I was reading a Jackie Collins novel.

Robyn Heil, Buyer for Brodart Co.

THE CLUB is a really solid and engaging thriller that takes what we know about celebrity culture and exposes a much darker side. I thought this novel was particularly successful at giving us a great collection of sinister celebs and service staff that all have bad habits and yet are not hateful to spend time with. The pacing was strong, the developments were interesting, and the overall concept was well-layered and thought through. It's a big challenge to create a story about celebrities where the characters are not actual celebs, but Ellery Lloyd do a great job of creating a story that feels part of our social world with all fictional characters.

I loved the concept of this book, and I thought the format was fantastic. Opening with a newspaper article and sprinkling in parts of the article throughout the book gave really enticing peeks at what was to come and how wild things would get. Unfortunately, the lack of characterization made the book just average for me. We get the story from too many different perspectives, and none of them were really unique enough for me to keep straight. There were several separate storylines going on, and if one or two of them had been eliminated, I think I would have enjoyed the book more. There was a lot of suspense and much like Lloyd’s previous novel People Like Her, the tension kept me flipping pages as fast as I could. While I personally preferred People Like Her, this unique and thrilling story will easily find an audience!

Review of The Club by Ellery Lloyd

⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

I enjoyed this thriller much more then People Like Her, the debut of this husband-wife writing team. My favorite aspect was the setting which is a totally isolated island resort with the rich and famous. I’m always a sucker for a locked room mystery. As tends to be the case, and as you might suspect, the characters were mostly despicable. However, one of the characters, Nikki, is very likable and I found myself rooting for her. I found the ending very satisfying with this one.

Quick synopsis: Ned is the millionaire entrepreneur/owner of The Club. They accept rich and famous members and for a large fee they can use the world’s multiple “houses”. They are luxury resorts where every whim and comfort is attended to for the members. This book opens at a huge weekend event with a few select guests: a married couple of actors, a huge artist, powerful businessmen etc. As predicted they all have secrets to hide and so does Ned, his brother/ employee, his assistant Nikki, and the director Annie. This weekend turns out to be unlike any other with bodies turning up left and right.

A huge thank you to @harper for a copy of this book as well as @netgalley for the digital copy.

Alternating between the weekend of the “events”, different narrators, and the tabloid piece that tells the present “official story”, we get a mystery set in the private, impossible to get into, Home Club of A-list celebrities. This was a bit hard to follow at times because of the multiple timelines but otherwise worked in favor of the story.
Ned Groom runs the worlds premier “Home” club for the rich and famous, with exclusive locations around the world. His most ambitious to date: turning an entire island into Island Club. The launch weekend finally comes and what appears to be a huge success in Ned’s eyes turns out to be a complete failure when the weekend is abruptly ended with the finding of a body.
This leads us through what happened, the why differing from person to person. Ultimately, secrets. And while the exposure of secrets seems to some people’s worst nightmare, some leave the island with even more than they arrived with.
The characters are greedy, selfish, dramatic and horrible in the most entertaining way. I could actually believe this was a real story because the author so perfectly narrated as different witnesses and as the media.
It also reads as a sort of commentary on the secrecy of the rich and what they can get away with all because of their money. Think: Jeffery Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell, Harvey Weinstein + the NXIUM scandal.
Very good read but caution should be taken for certain content re the above mentioned people.

After decades of exclusive luxurious clubs across the world, the Home Group is ready for its most exclusive club yet— Island Home. Island Home is full of leisure cabins, spas, bars, and restaurants off the coast of England. CEO Ned Groom decides to throw an exclusive party for A-listers to mark its opening, but tensions soon begin to rise as everyone has something to hide. Not everyone will make it out alive…

This was such an interesting premise— an exclusive club for the elite away from the public eye? Each person with a horrible secret to hide? Unfortunately I found the pacing to be slow and the characters hard to keep straight. It felt as if the author was trying to do too much and there was not enough differentiation between characters for me to keep the names straight in my head. I often found myself confused with Nikki vs Annie and Jackson vs. Keith vs. any other man guest. I think it was hard to connect with any of the characters due to the elitist nature of the island.

I did really enjoy the news article that was put at the end of each chapter though. Written in <I>Vanity Fair</I>, this article was set after the disaster of the Island launch weekend where multiple bodies were found. You get glimpses of the future at the end of each chapter, while also going through the weekend and getting the backstory of each character. I think this was something Ellery Lloyd did a great job of. A lot of these chapters ended on a cliff hanger and left you wanting to learn more.

I also liked how detailed everyone’s back story was and how inter-connected the characters were. The story was also told from four different point-of-views which was definitely the right move for this story. This gave the reader the information they needed without giving us too much at once. I do think some of the characters could have been more distinguishable though. I felt like they were all the same person, but with a different font. The only characters I could easily distinguish were Ned, Adam, and Jess. Everyone else kept blurring together until the last few chapters.

Most of the twists were easy to guess at, but there was one that definitely caught me off guard. I audibly gasped with that one— which is definitely what I want in a mystery!

Finally, I felt like the ending was fairly abrupt. Some of the storylines wrapped up so nicely with a pretty little bow, while others just did not feel finished. It also felt like the conclusion wrapped up so quickly after the climax and I was hoping for more.

Overall this was a great idea but the execution was not where I wanted it to be.

If a latter-day Agatha Christie wrote a locked-room mystery set at a fictional Soho House, you would have Ellery Lloyd’s The Club. This was an engaging and literary slow-burn mystery that was intimate and enjoyable, if a little slow at times.

I have always been fascinated with the private club magnet for the celebrity and creative elite, Soho House (even going so far as to try to scheme a way into joining until I learned of the exorbitant membership fee). Having attended Soho House functions as a guest, I always wondered when happened with the inner workings and admissions of such clubs, so this book was basically written for me.

This novel focuses on an isolated Island version of the elite club Home (a thinly veiled Soho House type of retreat) and a mysterious death that occurs within its confines. The book is told from 5 points of view, which was a little much for me (full disclosure: I have a short attention span and a finite memory bank for narrating characters). I loved the focus on the enigmatic founder of Home and the celebrity and socialite members. I would have loved a little more focus on those characters and a little less from characters I found more tertiary. I enjoyed the timely themes the book tackled (which I won’t elaborate on so as not to spoil the unfolding of the story) and thought the writing was very good. Being a thriller adrenaline junkie, I would have liked a little bit more action a bit quicker in the story. But I also enjoyed getting to know most of the characters and reading the well-executed plot.

This is a thoughtful and nicely executed and locked-room mystery. Thriller fans should know going in that this is a more literary slow-burn, traditional whodunit, rather than a high octane page-turner. It also has some interesting social commentary woven in. So read it when you are in the mood to do a little more thinking per page.

Thanks to Harper Collins, NetGalley, and the author for the enjoyable ARC.