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.

There was too much going on in this story, too many POVs and just too much to follow. I finished the book but honestly I was kind of bored the entire time. I did appreciate the ending twist but it was also predicitible. If there were less characters to follow, more story and less background it would have been a more fun read.

Thank you to the publisher for sending me an ARC in exchange for an honest review.

I was a fan of Ellery Lloyd's first book, People Like Her, so when I got a chance to read The Club, I ran for it. An exclusive celebrity club? Secrets and murder? Definitely intriguing.

I really enjoyed this behind the scenes look of a celebrity hot spot. The story was told from 4 different points of view, and each story intertwines by the end of the book. Think of the movie Valentine's Day or New Years Eve, where the multiple storylines are all connected throughout the story. I didn't find it difficult to follow along, as each character is distinctive enough to stand out on their own.

This entertaining story had me thinking one thing, then changing my mind, both with my opinions of the characters and where the story was taking me. What started as me being jealous over wanting to be there, by the end I was very thankful I was not well known and not on an island! The twists and turns worked so well. For the characters I didn't like, the ones that were interesting more than made up for it.

If you are looking for a fun whodunit and why, then this might be the book for you. I give this one 4 stars!

The Club by Ellery Lloyd was a page turner for me. It was like a train wreck that you just have to see what is going to happen next. I thought it was going in one direction and then all of a sudden it totally changed. I was on the edge of my seat and couldn't put this down! Between family drama, celebrities and all their drama, mean boss, and people who aren't who they say they are - this was woven together so well.

I really hate to DNF (Do Not Finish) a book, but I know how important it is to authors to have honest reviews!
I tried and tried again to get into this book. I picked it up, put it down and restarted it a couple of times; thinking that I just wasn't in the right headspace for this book. Sadly, this was not the case! Seeing that this was Reese Witherspoon's book club pick I thought it had to be good, but boy was I wrong. At the beginning of the book, the first couple of paragraphs were promising. It tried to draw you in but then it just fell flat. The more I read, the more characters introduced, the more lost I became. I felt like there was so much going on, but nothing really happening, if that makes sense. There seemed to be too many characters for me to keep track of, and i got lost and bored.

⭐️ The Club by Ellery Lloyd

I gave it the old college try. At page 100 I threw in the towel.

There was so much going on but yet nothing really happening. I couldn’t differentiate between the characters enough to know what was happening (or not happening) to whom. I started skimming paragraphs and searching for dialogue and yet could not stay interested. Ned and Adam, and the celebrities who were part of the club needed a good butt whooping — they were so annoying and disagreeable. I hate to be so negative on a book because I imagine writing a book is difficult but there was nothing redeeming about the first 100 pages that made me want to continue. 😕

DNF’d this one. Sorry. But thank you Netgalley for the ARC!

An exclusive club, and a three-day launch party that is dazzling yet disastrous. This is such an intriguing premise, and I started it off with a lot of curiosity and interest. I enjoyed the writing style, and I always like a story with multiple perspectives/timelines as the story builds with each new chapter.

However, as time went on I felt as though I was getting so much background, that I wasn't really getting much story. I felt like I lost interest. In the end, it came together in a way where the details made sense, however by that point it just did not do it for me. I would definitely read more from this author, this just wasn't my favorite.

This was so fun, but I would say I liked but didn’t love this one. I loved People Like Her, but thought there were too many POVs in this story. Still a fun and fast read about the rich and elite.

This book was fantastic! Loved getting to read before publishing date and will be recommending on Instagram, goodreads, and Amazon.

The Club centers around a murder mystery that has happened on an island resort that is part of The Home Group, an exclusive celebrity club. The Club shifts among the perspectives of various characters and newspaper clippings telling the story of the events leading up to the murder and coverage of the fallout.

The Club is a perfect spring/summer read. I read it while on a flight and during time off on a work trip and it helped me feel like I was on vacation. Even though none of the characters were real celebrities, Lloyd wrote about them in a way that was totally believable. The twists and turns kept me engaged and I never wanted to put this book down. If you're looking for a beach read, or a book to help you pretend like you're on vacation enjoying a beach read, I highly recommend this book.

It’s launch weekend for Island Home, the latest in the Home group of ultra-exclusive clubs for the rich and famous, and Ned Groom is finalizing the plans. Or rather, his staff is finalizing the plans. The guest list for this Halloween weekend party is small, meaning Annie Sparks’s phone is constantly buzzing with celebrities and their PAs trying to finagle a last minute invitation. As Head of Membership, she is expected to be available to their 1500 or so members, but she has no openings to offer for Island Home. Everything has been planned well in advance, and there are no empty rooms available.

But for the first night, Thursday, Ned only invited a handful of members, actor Jackson Crane and his wife Georgia, artist Keith Little, film producer Kurt Cox, and talk show host Freddie Hunter. Although Freddie did encourage his friend singer Kyra Highway to come with him, and she brought her 8-year-old daughter Lyra. After dinner, Annie made the announcement that soon they would be receiving new contracts to sign with an updated membership fee. In addition, they’ll all be getting an extra gift delivered to them.

What these exclusive guests don’t know yet is that the “gift” they’ll be receiving is a personalized flash drive that Ned has put together for them. What they don’t know yet is that those new membership fees include a hefty spike in what they will owe the Home Group moving forward. What they don’t know yet is that there are cameras all over the Home clubs, from the Manhattan Home to Cannes Home to Shanghai Home and all the other clubs around the world.

What Ned doesn’t seem to understand yet is that he is handing each of these individuals a reason for them to want him dead.

As the weekend goes on with its celebrations, its meals in the underwater restaurant Poseidon, its easy access to alcohol and drugs, people begin to disappear. Jackson Crane is holed up in his cabin with a Do Not Disturb in the system, so no staff will go near it. Ned Groom himself has gone missing, with his only communication a short email to his PA, “Gone to London.”

As secrets get revealed and emotions run high, the people at Island Home grow increasingly paranoid. And the more wound up they get, the more it becomes obvious that not everyone will make it off the island alive. But who will end up a villain, and who will end up a victim?

Told through a lengthy Vanity Fair article as well as the viewpoints of several Island insiders, The Club is a look inside the most exclusive and extreme lifestyles of the rich and famous. Filled with delicious secrets revealed and a slow burn story that takes its sweet time before making it clear what all happened that fateful weekend, this thriller is cunning and layered.

I listened to the audio book for this one, and I thought narrator Tamaryn Payne had the perfect voice for this novel. I loved her reading, and I thought it elevated this novel, making the slower moments more palatable.

I did like The Club, but it’s not perfect. Many of the characters are unlikable, and they get more so as the story goes on and more is revealed of their choices. There are parts of the story that are a little slow, and it took me a while to really understand who was who, but once I was in, I was in. If you’re a reader who loves books about the rooms behind the velvet ropes, you might really love this book. If you love a good thriller, you might like this book. If you’re a picky reader, you might want to skip this book, or at least read (or listen to) a sample before you decide. Like an exclusive club, this book is not for everyone.

Egalleys for The Cub were provided by Harper through NetGalley, but I bought the audio book myself through Audible.