I struggled to get into this book. I couldn’t seem to connect to the characters, or care what was happening to them.
This book felt like it had everything going for it with a cool setting and a pretty different plot from most thrillers, but something was missing for me.
I don’t know what it was about this story, but it didn’t grasp me at all. Always grateful for an advanced listen, netgalley.
2.5 ⭐️

Thank you NetGalley and Tantor media. I’d also like to thank Kristin Atherton for such an excellent job of narration. Tess is a documentarian. She had a hit 10 years ago with a documentary called Spill. Unfortunately, she hasn’t had a successful movie since. So when she is given the chance to film a crew tagging seal lions on a remote island near Spain, she jumps at the chance. This is a big chance to step foot on an island where no humans have been for over 50 years. All is going well until Tess finds a body, one wearing modern clothes. Soon things are strange. Why did the body have a pass card on him? Is someone else really on the island with them? Why is Alex so protective of the project? What is the motive behind Sea Wild? This was a great read. The pace is fast and the author doesn’t get bogged down with technical details about making a film. The description of the island is completely believable, and the characters are well developed. This would be a good book for book club or a nice beach read. Get this one and thank me later!

The Last Visitor is a twisty tale that takes place over 5 days on a tiny archipelago that is home to a colony of seals. The research team is the first to visit since 1971 or so they thought until a body is discovered. The story is told in 2 timelines - present day and 10 years ago when Tess worked on her documentary Spill.

I enjoyed Martin Griffin’s writing style and his description of the remote island. The story kept me engaged until the very end. Kristin Atherton did an excellent job with the narration.

Thank you to NetGalley & Tantor Audio for letting me read this ARC.

This has all the elements I enjoy in my mysteries. The isolated setting is an island with a dilapidated lighthouse. Tess is a disgraced documentary filmmaker taking this last opportunity to redeem herself. Something happened in her past, and the police are calling to ask her about it. So Tess flees to film a team of environmentalists who are tagging the marine mammals who call the island home. There, she meets a cast of likable characters who start acting more and more suspicious as the story progresses. Tess then finds a dead body and the claustrophobic feeling of the island ratchets up. I didn’t like Tess. She is whiny, stubborn and keeps making things worse. But such is the power of a good audiobook narration that Kristin Atherton made me care. Her performance is so rounded that I kept rooting for Tess, despite my not finding her likable. I enjoyed the voices she gave to the rest of the characters. She made them all distinct and changed them subtly as the plot twists revealed their secrets. Is there a killer amongst them? Or is there someone else on the island? Someone that we haven’t seen before? I liked the ending too.
I chose to listen to this audiobook and all opinions in this review are my own and completely unbiased. Thank you, NetGalley/Tantor Audio.

I was very excited to be approved for this audiobook because the story sounded so great and a clever whoddunit and locked-room mystery. However, it was clear that my interest in the story was not going to come from the narrator. I thought her voice was flat and very unemotional. She sounded like she’d rather be doing anything else. As for the story, I didn’t find the characters all that interesting or engaging. I had hard time dispensing one from the other, so none of them seemed really memorable. And weirdly the story seemed like one of those summer beach reads (despite the setting of this particular novel) because the story had a “been there done that” feeling to it as there are numerous mystery books with a similar premise. I was surprised by the ending, but by that time I was ready for the book to be over.