Five old friends reunite for an idyllic glamping holiday on the rugged Cornwall coast, but tensions rise when a storm leaves them stranded and someone goes missing.
Max and Annie Kingsley have left the London rat race with their twelve-year-old son to set up a glamping site in the wilds of Cornwall. Eager for a dry run ahead of their opening, they invite three old university friends and their families for a long-needed reunion and a relaxing weekend.
But the festivities soon go awry as tensions arise between the children (and subsequently their parents), explosive secrets come to light, and a sudden storm moves in, cutting them off from help as one in the group disappears.
Moving between a police investigation, a hospital room and the catastrophic weekend, The Search Party is a propulsive destination thriller about the tenuous bonds of friendship and the lengths parents will go to protect their children.
The Search Party marks a new direction for Hannah Richell, and I’m more than here for it! This is easily one of the most compulsively page-turning thrillers I’ve read in a long time. Known for her suspenseful dramas, Richell’s backlist has perfectly positioned her to create the phenomenal cast of characters and complex web of relations that propel this full-blown crime thriller forward. She’s a seasoned author now, at the top of her game.
The relational complexity in The Search Party places it miles ahead of your average whodunnit. The characters face ethical and existential conundrums as they’re forced to consider their life choices in the context of their 20-year friendship, and their generational and ideological variations make for riveting reading. Think elements of The Slap, but with more of a crime-thriller bent – all amplified, of course, by the lack of phone reception and the disastrous storm that prevents any means of escape.
The other genius element in this novel is the way Richell fully exploits her stellar cast of characters to present us with multiple timelines and POVs, which gradually knit together to convey the full picture of what has gone down on this fateful weekend. With each chapter illuminating a portion of the weekend from a different character’s perspective, we’re left scrambling to gather enough clues to fill in the blanks the whole way through. It all builds up to a shocking – and utterly convincing – reveal, with a terrific twist that I, for one, did not see coming.
Clear your schedule for The Search Party – with sky-high stakes and so many fantastic characters to invest in, you will not be able to stop reading until you find out who is safe, who is culpable, and how exactly it all went so disastrously wrong…
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