The Last Party by Clare Mackintosh.

On New Year’s Eve, Rhys Lloyd has a house full of guests.

His lakeside holiday homes are a success, and he’s generously invited the village to drink champagne with their wealthy new neighbours. This will be the party to end all parties.

But not everyone is there to celebrate. By midnight, Rhys will be floating dead in the freezing waters of the lake.

On New Year’s Day, DC Ffion Morgan has a village full of suspects.

The tiny community is her home, so the suspects are her neighbours, friends and family – and Ffion has her own secrets to protect.

With a lie uncovered at every turn, soon the question isn’t who wanted Rhys dead . . . but who finally killed him.

In a village with this many secrets, a murder is just the beginning.

Review

This the first in DC Morgan Mystery Series is an exciting and thrilling story about a small community and the death of one of their own Rhys lloyd. Thrown into the mix is DC Ffion Morgan who has to discover the who the murderer is, not just from the visitors at the lakeside development, but amongst her friends and neighbours.

So many things contribute to why this is such a fantastic read, superb characterisation, an evocative setting and a story full of thrills guaranteed to have you sat on the edge of your reading chair, cwtched up and lost in the world of Cwm Coed. Atmosphere is very important in these novels, the levels of tension that are rarely found in other genres. The mountains and lakes of this Welsh community on one side of the lake and the English border on the other side, is cleverly used to draw on the tensions that have simmered between the Welsh speaking community and their English counterparts for centuries. You can feel the animosity leeching from the pages, the tension between those the welcome this new development and those that hate its very existence. How the new new comers seem to be equally divided towards the villagers, all mixed up into a melting pot that leads to murder and deception. It is as if the land in which they are living is drawing on past hatreds, leaving me the reader unable to turn away from the story until the last page was turned. It really is one of the best uses of landscape to create a sense of mounting danger in a novel I have ever read.

The characters especially DC Ffion Morgan are superb. Intelligent, passionate and troubled she is the epitome of the strong women who have inhabited these communities for hundreds of years. What really makes her special is the writer’s willingness to slowly peel away at the layers of her personality as the story progresses, yet never losing sight of her core strength, her passion for solving crime. Her vunerabity is never allowed to overshadow the story, but gives it an emotional depth that left me wanting to walk into the pages of the novel and stand at her side in sisterly support.

I really can’t wait for the second in the series to be published. Murder and secrets have never been more exciting than in The Last Party.

You can buy this novel from Amazon and Waterstones

About the author

With over 2 million copies of her books sold worldwide, number one bestseller Clare Mackintosh is the multi-award-winning author of I Let You Go, which was a Sunday Times and New York Times bestseller and the fastest-selling title by a new crime writer in 2015. It also won the Theakston Old Peculier Crime Novel of the Year in 2016. Both Clare’s second and third novels, I See You and Let Me Lie, were number one Sunday Times bestsellers. All three of her thrillers were selected for the Richard & Judy Book Club, and together have been translated into forty languages. After the End was published in 2019 and became an instant Sunday Times bestseller, and in 2021 Hostage flew straight into the top ten. Together, her books have spent more than sixty weeks in The Sunday Times bestseller lists.

Clare is patron of the Silver Star Society, a charity based at the John Radcliffe hospital in Oxford, which supports parents experiencing high-risk or difficult pregnancies. She lives in North Wales with her husband and their three children.

For more information visit Clare’s website http://www.claremackintosh.com or find her at http://www.facebook.com/ClareMackWrites or on Twitter @ClareMackint0sh

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