When the production crew fails to show up and one of their own meets a violent end, these social media moguls find themselves stranded with a dead body and no way to reach the outside world. When they start receiving messages from a mysterious Sponsor threatening to expose their darkest secrets, they realize that they’ve been lured into a deadly game…and one of them might be pulling the strings.
With the body count rising and cameras tracking their every move, the creators must figure out who is trying to get them canceled--like, literally--before their #1 follower strikes again. (Pub Date: Oct 31 2023)
It's an easy read and the mystery had me guessing until near the end. It had many ingredients for a good book, but some of them went bad and got a little of the fun it had the potential to deliver.
2.5 rounded up.
It starts with a bunch of influencers invited to a new reality show on a private island. But soon, it's revealed the plan of whoever is sponsoring this show goes much beyond just putting them together with the people they hate the most. This is a bit of a thriller, of the kind that everyone has a bad thing to hide, and one of those things is that they may be a killer, or maybe someone else they can't see is. That also gets the story closer to horror, especially because someone is definitely a psycho, whether they're among them or hiding somewhere. But truths are coming up and those voted by the group end up dead.
The story is told by four different characters in different stages of their lives as content creators. My first problem with the book was exactly this. I had no way to differentiate who was narrating. Their voices, even though they were characters with different personalities, were all the same. So while the author managed to get me to know each of the participants of the show, I was always going back on the pages to remind me again who was narrating the chapter.
Of course the story has also been done in multiple ways. A lot of it reminded me of Agatha Christie's And Then There Were None, though we don't know if we're really dealing with a closed-room mystery or if someone did manage to hide themselves somewhere. But at a point I was about to look for the poem to check.
And here we reach the other issue. I'm not sure the planning was thorough. Of course you can't just make it up as you go in a story like this, but I started losing trust in it being able to amaze me way too soon because the happenings felt more that they were there to give you a little scare than to move the plot. Which made it predictable. The moment the story was about to drag, someone would die. And you even knew who that someone was. Of course we get some sort of explanation in the end of why this happened, but I read it read more like the writer recognizing it than the character.
Since I'm mentioning the ending... no spoilers, don't worry. But I'm not a fan of getting a long letter at the end of mystery books explaining what the story should have already. I'm grateful they didn't let those points become loose ends, but just because now I know what happened. Because the feeling is the same.
It's still a good story. It's not super predictable even if the trope has been overused. You'll probably enjoy it despite all the flaws.
Honest review based on an ARC provided by Netgalley. Many thanks to the publisher for this opportunity.
Rating: 3 out of 5.
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