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The newest location of the Home Group’s super-exclusive, ultra-luxurious private escapes for celebrities is hosting a small launch party. Island Home is the biggest and most ambitious of its CEO’s projects: a whole English island with an updated manor, nearly 100 guest cabins, and acres of woods and miles of beaches. Everyone wants to be invited, but only a few make the cut. Island Home has been long in the works, and costs have gone through the roof. Tensions are high in Home Group’s leadership, and more is at stake than almost anyone knows as a few select artists, singers and actors begin arriving for the big weekend.
Each of the Home locations is private, with no cameras or cellphones allowed. Island Home adds to that privacy with its isolation, with only one road (passable only at certain times) connecting the island to the mainland. Guests can party hard, do whatever they want, and be assured of nothing being shared in the press. But when something goes wrong, that isolation will only compound the danger.
Partway into the weekend, one very important person goes missing. Then others end up dead. As the hours tick by, tensions rise and behaviors get worse. And everyone, staff and guests, seems to have secrets and motives for murder.
The Club is a tightly paced thriller. Readers learn a bit more as the story unfolds about each character, their backgrounds and reasons to want someone else dead or hurt very badly. The culprits for each death aren’t clear until the very end. It’s a good mystery that keeps you on the edge of your seat.
(Another wealthy-people-stuck-somewhere thriller: One by One by Ruth Ware.)
Rated: High. Profanity includes more than 80 uses of strong language, around 25 instances of moderate profanity, a few uses of mild language, and about 10 instances of the name of Deity in vain. There are several instances of the British curse word bl-. There are a number of crude references. Sexual content doesn’t include any scenes where sex is happening, just some mentions of before and after. A main character was the victim of a much older predator in a sexual relationship when she was only 15 years old. She finds out as an adult, much later, that he preyed on many other girls that age. There are references to characters having regular affairs and one-night encounters. The book has plenty of alcohol use and occasional drug use. There are several murders and an attempted killing, including by drug overdose, car accident, and strangling. Two characters drown.
