The Club: A Reese's Book Club Pick

By Ellery Lloyd

A REESE'S BOOK CLUB PICK

INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER

“Are you ready for the roller coaster ride that is The Club? . . . A beautifully written, densely plotted murder mystery that takes place at a private club off the coast of England. Read about a luxurious, celeb-only island during a weekend of partying and ultimately murder.” —Reese Witherspoon (Reese’s Book Club March ’22 Pick)

From the author of People Like Her comes a smart and sinister murder mystery set in the secretive world of exclusive celebrity clubs.

Everyone's Dying to Join . . .

The Home Group is a glamorous collection of celebrity members' clubs dotted across the globe, where the rich and famous can party hard and then crash out in its five-star suites, far from the prying eyes of fans and the media.

The most spectacular of all is Island Home—a closely-guarded, ultraluxurious resort, just off the English coast—and its three-day launch party is easily the most coveted A-list invite of the decade.

But behind the scenes, tensions are at breaking point: the ambitious and expensive project has pushed the Home Group's CEO and his long-suffering team to their absolute limits. All of them have something to hide—and that's before the beautiful people with their own ugly secrets even set foot on the island. 

As tempers fray and behavior worsens, as things get more sinister by the hour and the body count piles up, some of Island Home’s members will begin to wish they’d never made the guest list.

Because at this club, if your name’s on the list, you’re not getting out.

• Language: English
• Publisher: HarperCollins
• Release date: Mar 1, 2022
• ISBN: 9780062997449

Ellery Lloyd

Ellery Lloyd is the pseudonym for the London-based husband-and-wife writing team of Collette Lyons and Paul Vlitos. Collette is a journalist and editor, the former content director of Elle (UK), and editorial director at Soho House. She has written for the Guardian, the Telegraph, and the Sunday Times. Paul is the author of two previous novels, Welcome to the Working Week and Every Day Is Like Sunday. He is a Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Greenwich. They are the authors of People Like Her and The Club.

Book preview

Contents

Cover

Title Page

[Untitled text opener]

Chapter One: Thursday Afternoon

Chapter Two: Thursday Evening

Chapter Three: Friday Morning

Chapter Four: Friday Afternoon

Chapter Five: Friday Evening

Chapter Six: Saturday Morning

Chapter Seven: Saturday Afternoon

Chapter Eight: Saturday Night

Chapter Nine: Sunday Morning

Epilogue: A Funeral

Acknowledgments

About the Author

Also by Ellery Lloyd

Copyright

About the Publisher

By the time the Land Rover was halfway across the causeway it must have been obvious they were never going to make it. Not at the speed that tide was coming in. Not with that distance still to go. At which point, what do you do? One spot about halfway across at which careful passing is possible aside, even at its broadest the road linking the island to the mainland is only ever about a vehicle and a half wide. Even at its highest, at the lowest tide, the road is only a foot or two above the level of the surrounding mudflats. There is nowhere even to attempt a three-point turn. There is no way you are going to get back to the island in reverse, blind drunk, in the middle of the night, in a borrowed and unfamiliar vehicle.

Behind you, on the island, the party is still going strong, fireworks popping and fizzing. A mile or so ahead you can just make out the silhouette of the village—the orange glow of the harbor front, a light or two still on here and there in an upstairs window. So what do you decide? Your first instinct is to keep going, to put your foot down. To take your chances at forty, at forty-five, fifty, on this unfamiliar, sinuous track in the pitch dark, the headlights illuminating just one unpredictably curved stretch of the causeway in front of you at a time, black waves already lapping across it, the road ahead rapidly narrowing, disappearing. You could sound the horn, flash your lights wildly—but even if you did manage to attract someone’s attention, even if somebody on shore did see you or hear you and call the coast guard, what could the coast guard possibly do, given the speed things are progressing, considering the distances involved?

And then the horror becomes not just what is happening, but how easy it is, numbed and jumbled and fuzzy as you are, to imagine what will happen next. The grimly dawning realization that within minutes the water will be up to your axles, up to your headlights. That at some point, probably sooner rather than later, the engine will suck in water and choke, and the whole vehicle will grind to a halt.

And all this time, the Land Rover’s other occupant is screaming at you from the passenger seat, telling you this is all your fault, demanding you do something, flailing around, panicking.

And it occurs to you that you should call someone, call anyone, but then of course you realize your phone is still on the island; they took your phone, and even if they hadn’t, there probably wouldn’t be any reception out here anyway.

And you wonder how long you would survive out there, in the cold water, in the darkness, if you tried to swim for it, given the time of the year, and the strength of the currents, and how far you are from the shore.

And at some point it dawns on you that whatever you do now, the result is inevitable.

And at some point it dawns on you that the media are going to have an absolute field day with this.

And perhaps at that moment—but only perhaps, and only for a moment—it dawns on you that this is no more and no less than the ending you so richly deserve.

Vanity Fair

Murder on the Island

It was the club you’d kill to join; the launch event to which the A-list were dying to be invited. What no one could have anticipated was how tragically things were about to go wrong. In this exclusive investigation, Ian Shields cuts to the heart of the case that baffled the world . . .

The party on the island had been going on for days.

All Friday morning, all Friday afternoon, helicopters had been arriving, departing, circling. Speedboats thumping back and forth across the glittering waves. A steady stream of blacked-out SUVs making their way down hedgerowed Essex lanes, past bare brown fields and damp black trees, through the narrow streets of the village of Littlesea. At around midday someone counted three Model S Teslas driving past, one after another.

A celebrity wedding, you might have said, if you didn’t know better. Some millionaire’s fiftieth birthday.

All Saturday afternoon, all Saturday evening, from across the water, sometimes louder, sometimes fainter, came drifting the steady doof-doof-doof of distant bass. Here and there, over the course of the weekend, in the late mornings, in the afternoons, if your eyesight was good enough or you had a pair of binoculars, you could just make out from the mainland where people had laid big blue-and-white-striped blankets on the foreshore. A head bobbing in the water. A horse kicking through the sand, its rider bouncing along in the saddle.

Now and again, in the evenings, you could make out through the trees the flicker of huge flaming Tiki torches, the front of the Manor illuminated in yellow or green or blue. There were even times, if the wind was in the right direction, when it was possible to imagine you could hear the crowd: their cheers, their whoops, their laughter. Their screams.

As well as celebrating Island Home’s grand opening, the lavish party also marked thirty years since the company’s CEO, Ned Groom—one of hospitality’s great visionaries—had inherited the Home Club in Covent Garden from his grandfather and boldly set to work transforming it from a dusty and undersubscribed private drinking den for actors, performers, and other stage professionals into the modishly renamed Home, the most exclusive and talked-about London nightspot of the decade (that decade being the 1990s), whose famous front-door superstars stumbled out of and straight onto the pages of the next day’s tabloids. Kate Moss had her birthday party there several years in a row. Kiefer Sutherland and his entourage were famously turned away one night. The entire cast of Friends took over the roof terrace for their final London press junket.

It was now almost twenty-five years since Ned and his right-hand man, his brother Adam Groom, had crossed the Atlantic to launch their second club, the now-iconic Manhattan Home.

In the years and decades since, the Home Group had become a genuine global brand, a collection of eleven members’ clubs with attached hotel suites, all offering—for a hefty annual fee—the same comforting combination of down-to-earth luxury, effortfully understated cool, and absolute privacy to the chosen few. There was Santa Monica Home. Highland Home. Country Home. Cannes Home. Hamptons Home. Venice Home. Shanghai Home. There were Homes in Malibu, in Paris, in Upstate New York. Each one in a jaw-dropping setting: a former embassy (Shanghai), a grand palazzo (Venice), a deconsecrated cathedral (Cannes), a restored country pile (Country Home, in Northamptonshire; Highland Home, in Perthshire).

Even so, nothing that Ned Groom had ever attempted was on anything like the scale of Island Home. A whole island, two miles across, two and a half miles long, ninety minutes’ drive from London, complete with neo-Palladian manor, acres of woodland and miles of beaches, ninety-seven individual guest cabins, five restaurants, three bars, several gyms, tennis courts, spin studio, spa, sauna, helipad, screening rooms, stables, and heated natural outdoor swimming pool. All of it private property, accessible by land only at low tide along a twisting mile-and-a-half-long causeway. Despite the five-thousand-pound-plus-per-night price tag, before a single member had ever set foot on the sand, Island Home was booked solid for an entire year.

It was perhaps only to be expected, given the size of the place, given the ambition of what Ned Groom and his team were attempting, not to mention Ned’s legendary perfectionism, that not everything had gone quite according to schedule. First it had been due to open in the early spring, then the late spring, then the summer, then autumn.

For months, Home had been hiring staff—kitchen staff, front-desk staff, maintenance staff, waiters, housekeepers, a thirty-person events team, an eighty-person security team—and training them all in the particularities and peculiarities of working for one of the world’s most exclusive and discreet cliques, dealing with some of the world’s most particular and precious people.

For weeks, all hands had been on deck, inspecting and testing and double-checking, to make certain that the cabins scattered around the island—each one composed of vintage timber reclaimed from hundreds of historical wooden barns, huts, and sheds the design team had spent years sourcing and acquiring from as far afield as Bulgaria, Slovakia, Estonia—were ready to receive their first overnight guests. To certify that the log burners were correctly ventilated and weren’t going to suffocate anyone in their sleep. To ensure that all the lights switched on, all the toilets flushed, all the baths ran at the correct, thunderous water pressure, filling each cast-iron, claw-foot tub in under three minutes. To confirm that the winding gravel paths were clear and navigable, whether on foot or by bicycle, electric scooter or chauffeur-driven golf cart. That sudden sharp drops and deep water and other natural hazards were clearly signposted. That, by the time the first members arrived, all the paint was dry, patches of splintered wood sanded, exposed wires tucked away, and that no one was going to get electrocuted or accidentally impaled.

In retrospect, perhaps any tragedy seems to acquire a sense of inevitability.

The final event of the launch, Sunday morning’s brunch, was meant to be the surprise highlight of the entire weekend, reports Josh Macdonald, one of six successive head architects to have worked on the Island Home project over the course of its eight-year gestation. Ned was in an expensive arms race with himself—each new Home club had to outdo the last, with at least one extraordinary feature that made it unique: the Perspex-bottomed rooftop pool in Shanghai, the glass cube bar inside the ruined chapel at Highland Home. This time it was the underwater restaurant, Poseidon.

The idea, says Macdonald, was inspired by a place where Ned had dined in the Maldives. There’s a bar and an entrance at beach level with a view out across the water, over toward the mainland. When it’s time to eat, you cross a polished concrete bridge and then walk through a tunnel and down some steps and find yourself emerging into this vast room, like a giant fishbowl. In the middle of the room is the kitchen and bar, surrounded by tables and chairs, and out through the windows all you can see is the sea, Macdonald explains. Shoals of mackerel. Clouds of blue jellyfish. The undersides of boats. The sunlight playing on the waves overhead. Ned wanted all that to be the last thing that guests saw before leaving the party, to ensure a truly lasting impression of Island Home that everyone would be talking about for weeks to come.

He certainly achieved that.

According to those who were there, the question most members were asking as they filed into breakfast on that final morning of the three-day party, nursing their hangovers, was, Where was Ned? Usually at a launch like this he was omnipresent, telling jokes, making sure everybody was having a good time. Six foot four and solidly built, a former rugby player, a qualified barrister, he had a booming voice and a raucous laugh you could hear wherever you were standing in the room. Now, remarking on his absence, guests found themselves wondering aloud about the last time they had spoken to him. Speculating about where Ned might be, gossiping about the events of the night before and the night before that, tucking into their egg-white omelets, green juices, and turmeric lattes, on the lookout for familiar faces, it was some time before anyone noticed anything peculiar out there in the water, beyond the curved plate-glass windows.

It was the sun breaking through the clouds for the first time that gray, late-autumn morning that did it, sending a shaft of light into the gloom of the seabed, illuminating what had previously looked like a cluster of rocks, an indistinct shape in the water.

That was when diners began leaving their tables, started wandering over to the window, pointing at it, recalls one Home member and party guest, who has asked not to be named. People were laughing and joking. We thought it was a Land Rover publicity stunt and people were impressed, especially as the car was upside down, and about twenty feet underwater, wedged against a big rock. What a way to get us to sit up and take notice! Everyone was asking how they had got it down there, how long it had been submerged. Then, she says, people started to realize what was inside the car. Then, she says, someone started sobbing.

Shortly afterward it was announced that a body had been found on the island.

And that was when the party of the year turned into the murder mystery of the decade.

Chapter One

Thursday Afternoon

Jess

She had made it.

That was what Jess kept catching herself thinking.

Head of housekeeping, Island Home. Her name was Jess Wilson and she was the new head of housekeeping for Island Home.

She still couldn’t quite believe it.

It had all been a bit like a dream, the past week. First the phone call from Home’s head office, offering her an interview—after all those years of applying. All those years of hoping. All those years of being told they would keep her CV on file.

Then the interview itself, down in London, with Adam Groom, Home Group’s director of special projects, the second-most-important person in the whole company. Her sudden panic about what to wear, what to say.

It would be hard to exaggerate how much she had wanted this, or for how long. Growing up where she had, in Northamptonshire, just down the road from Country Home, she could remember driving with her parents past that long drystone wall, glimpsing through the trees the glinting waters of the estate’s private lake, peeking through the front gates at the long straight drive up to the Elizabethan manor house, experiencing a little thrill every time, trying to guess what it looked like inside. Hearing a helicopter passing overhead and wondering who was on board. Reading about Home in magazines, as a teenager, imagining what it would be like to work there, to be part of something like that.

There was still a very small part of Jess that worried this was all going to turn out to have been a terrible mistake. That she was going to get to Island Home only to be told they’d looked into her references and discovered her to be an imposter. That as soon as she opened her mouth everyone would immediately know—new haircut and new clothes notwithstanding—that she was just not cool enough to work somewhere like this, would never fit in, was not what they had been looking for at all.

That was certainly the impression she had carried away from her interview.

It had taken place at Covent Garden Home, Jess shifting forward and backward in an armchair that was slightly too low for the table, conscious that the straining button on her new blouse was in serious danger of popping open, trying to assume a position that looked relaxed yet eager, trying to work out what to do with her elbows. All the advice her friends had given her about this interview and all the pep talks she had given herself on the journey felt suddenly irrelevant and absurd when faced with an obviously hungover Adam Groom eating a full English breakfast.

Between wincing sips from a Bloody Mary, he had squinted at her printed-out CV for what was evidently the first time, telling her random things about himself whenever he glanced up from his scrappy bit of paper and addressing her chest throughout. The only mention made of the distance she’d traveled down from Northamptonshire to meet him in person was when Adam remarked that the hotel she currently worked at—the Grange—was just down the road from Country Home. I know, she had told him, smiling. I’ve actually applied for jobs there quite a few times . . . Eight, to be precise. She would have said more about why, perhaps added something about how much she admired all that Adam and his brother had achieved with Home, what a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity working at the launch of one of their clubs would be, but as she was in the middle of talking, Adam had called the waitress (young, slim, pretty) over to ask for a bit more ketchup, and Jess had trailed off.

All the way home on the train—that long, expensive, unreimbursed train journey—she’d kicked herself for all the stupid things she’d said, all the opportunities she’d missed to sell herself, thought about all the things she would say to Adam if she were being interviewed again now. All the things she would not say. Knowing that this had been her big chance and she had fluffed it.

That night she had received a phone call asking her whether she was available to start immediately.

Of course, she’d told them, not even really thinking until she got off the phone—it was so unexpected, the whole thing—what a bombshell this was going to be to her current employers, her colleagues, her friends. Not until even later did it occur to her that she had never asked why her predecessor had left so suddenly, what kind of arrangements, if any, had been made for the handover.

It was hard to believe that had only been a week ago. The past few days had been manic. Frantic shopping expeditions, the last-minute haircut she was not quite sure about (a feathery shoulder-length bob the hairdresser told her would be easy to manage but was actually impossible to style into anything other than a bird’s nest by herself), a moment of panic late the previous evening when it had looked as if her suitcase wasn’t going to close. A couple of days’ induction at Home’s head office in London. The kind of restless night you always have before a big day, waking before your alarm goes off.

And now here she was, having waited on the mainland for the causeway to become passable, crossing it in a chauffeur-driven electric Land Rover Defender with two other new arrivals, both Littlesea locals, all daunted, all trying very hard not to show it. She would surely never forget that first sight of the road emerging from the sea, surprisingly winding, alarmingly narrow, the way the piles of rocks on either side of the track appeared first; then within minutes the wet surface of the road itself was shining in the early-afternoon sunlight, clumps of seaweed still stranded across it in inky scribbles, the island a hulking outline on the horizon.

She would have been a fool not to be a little nervous. How different all this would be from the Grange, the hotel at which she had worked for so long, with its acres of tartan carpets, its formal dining room complete with bow-tied waiters, the saloon bar with its golfing prints, the little plastic bottles of lily-of-the-valley toiletries, the lingering smell of disinfectant in the corridors. How weird it was going to be to move from somewhere so familiar, where she knew everybody, where everybody knew her, to somewhere completely new, completely strange.

It was a bright October afternoon, the cloudless blue sky crisscrossed with vapor trails.

As the wooded island ahead of them loomed ever larger and wider and darker, Jess tried to make out all the different buildings and features that had just been described in their induction. The Manor, or at least a windowed turret of it, was visible first, peeking out among the tips of the pines. Then, as they got closer, she could make out their destination: the Boathouse, a two-story weathered wooden building a hundred meters from the end of the causeway, with an adjoining large parking lot full of glossy black SUVs next to a glass-fronted reception area where members collected their cabin keys, deposited their phones for the duration of the stay, and sipped champagne in front of a blazing fire while they waited for a porter in a golf cart. Next to that, farther down the pine-lined beach, was a concrete and cedar single-story building jutting out into the water—this, Jess supposed, was the underwater restaurant, Poseidon. Beyond that she could make out a steep road disappearing up a sharp slope into the woods.

This was not the landscape she’d grown up with, but she could see its beauty, even—or perhaps especially—at this time of year. The pale slender trunks of the silver birches. The fierce glow of the beeches. The yellow of gorse and broom. The dark pebble beaches. The white-blond stretches of sand. Springy thickets of sea buckthorn. Banks of browning bracken. The late-autumn sunlight sparkling on the waves.

For the most part—and for obvious reasons—the cabins and their terraces were arranged so they weren’t easy to spot from a distance, from the water. The spa and tennis courts were on the far side of the island, close to the old water tower that was now a revolving Italian restaurant, near the sailing and water-sports facilities and the staff accommodations (not visible from the water either, and where about half the island’s employees—Jess included—would be based, the other half arriving each morning from the mainland). It was funny to think how strange all this felt to her now, and how familiar it all would be in just a few days’ time. Her Home.

The people were going to take a bit of adjusting to as well. The head of membership, Annie Spark, for instance, an extraordinary vision with waist-length Jessica Rabbit–red hair, in a bright pink jumpsuit, high-top sneakers, and huge gold hoop earrings, who had greeted her at the Causeway Inn, the seventeenth-century harborside pub overlooking the exact point the causeway met the mainland, acquired by the Home Group (Annie had explained) as somewhere members could sit and enjoy one of a range of fifteen local ales and ciders or a bite to eat while they waited for the tide to turn and the road across to the island to become passable.

In one of the downstairs bars—a room with a sea view, arranged with low, mismatched vintage armchairs, a pair of crossed logs smoldering in the fireplace—Annie had talked them all through the itinerary for the weekend.

Tonight, Thursday, there would be an intimate dinner for a select five guests (and four very senior members of Home staff) in the Manor, hosted by Ned Groom. Annie had listed the members invited. Jess felt her heart jump. All around her, fellow newbies tried to keep their expressions neutral. It had already been underlined, both at the interview and in a stern aside from Annie, that you would not last long at Home if you were the kind of person who was easily starstruck.

It had also been made very clear, when she had accepted the job, what a privilege it was as a senior member of the team to be allowed to keep a phone on her while she was working. Indeed, on her arrival at the head office, she had been given a brand-new work iPhone and instructed to keep it with her, charged and on at all times, in case she was needed. She had also been told, very firmly, never to take it out when a guest was there—just as all the arriving staff had been instructed to keep an eye out for any member who’d failed to surrender theirs on arrival.

This is one of the few places in the world, Annie had reminded them, that most of these people can eat a meal or have a drink or just sit around doing nothing and be absolutely confident no one is going to snap a picture of them doing it. Try to imagine what that feels like. Just try to imagine how much you’d be willing to pay for it. And that’s why any member you see with a phone in their hand—because, believe it or not, they’re not immune to the urge—is off the island, immediately, their membership canceled. And that’s why none of our waiters, waitresses, bar staff, or housekeeping crews are allowed mobiles either.

She could do this, Jess told herself. She had been in hospitality ever since she left school—before, if you counted that first weekend job, making beds in a local B&B. She’d spent ten years at the Grange, steadily working her way up to housekeeping manager. She had always got on with her team, always taken pride in her job. She could do this. People were people. Guests were guests.

The rest of the invitees—Annie had reeled off more names, some familiar, some Annie obviously expected to be—would arrive in carefully coordinated waves from Friday morning onward, and there was a packed schedule to keep them occupied all the way through to Sunday afternoon: boat trips, horse rides, brunches, lunches, dinners, movie screenings. Every cabin would be occupied, every guest one of Home’s most valued members. Nothing—Annie’s tone was gently emphatic, her expression encouraging—would be too much trouble.

While she spoke, Annie’s phone kept pinging and ringing. Every so often she would inspect it and smirk or frown. The instant the induction was over, she had it clamped to her ear and was talking loudly in a bright voice before she was even out of the room.

How Jess envied Annie her confidence, her air of unflappability, the boldness of her style. All that scarlet hair, gathered in a twist over one shoulder, the heavily kohled and fringe-framed eyes. Those great crimson talons. Perhaps it was easier to be confident when you were as tall as Annie was—six foot something, easily. Jess wished she had introduced herself a bit more forcefully, or that she had been brave enough to put her hand up during Annie’s talk and ask just one of the hundreds of questions she had about this island, this weekend, this job.

She was going to need all the confidence and boldness she could muster to get through the next few days.

Nearly there now, their driver—he wore a tight blue polo shirt and mirrored sunglasses—announced over his shoulder. He gave a little tap on the horn as they neared the end of the causeway. Someone emerged from the glass-fronted Boathouse holding a clipboard, and waved.

This was it.

If only her parents could see her now, Jess thought. All those girls at school.

There was no doubt that this was the opportunity of a lifetime.

Now all she had to do was stick to the plan.

Annie

It could be brutal, this job.

"My darling, my angel, my love. You know if there was space, I would have you here in a heartbeat! No, no, don’t cry . . ."

For months now Annie Spark had been having conversations like this, or avoiding them. For the past week her phone had literally not stopped ringing from the moment she got up in the morning until she crawled into bed at night. The texts. The Instagram DMs. The voice-mail messages. The texts to see if you had got their DM or had a chance to listen to their voice-mail message yet. The emails to see if they still had your mobile number right.

At the last count, there were 5,761 Home members worldwide. There could only ever be 150 of them, give or take, at a launch.

The invitation to Island Home’s Halloween weekend opening party had been couriered to the chosen few on August 14. For weeks before that, Annie had been adding names, rethinking, removing, making the final adjustments. As soon as the coveted gilt-edged cards had been sent out, nestled in custom monogrammed cashmere bathrobes and silk pajamas, she braced herself for the onslaught. Annie occupied an odd space in members’ minds—a

Reviews for The Club

[sallyelizabethmurphy · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

Tedious and pointless. Two stars is generous

[geauxgetlit · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Loved the storyline of the rich and famous seeking exclusive VIP status to an opening party of Home’s getaway on Butchers Island. Home is an exclusive multi property private getaway for only the most fabulous celebs in the business.

Cell phones and cameras aren’t allowed at Home and it’s a place where the celebs can be themselves without any chance of anyone ever seeing or hearing about it.
This book shows the ultimate twisted portrait of how wealth and power can lead to a very dark and evil side in people.

Highly recommend this scandalous sensational read.

[mojomomma_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Pretty good psychological thriller, although there are a ton of characters to keep straight. Ned and his brother Adam open another exclusive resort. Members are carefully selected. What they don't realize is that they are secretly filmed in their rooms and Ned keeps the records to blackmail members for more money. His extortion finally reaches a limit and the members and the staff turn on the brothers in strange and deadly ways. Just enough twist and turns to keep you listening!

[romonko · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Welcome Home! The Club where you have to kill to get into. This was a real slow-burner of a thriller. In some ways it reminded me of locked-room mysteries from the Golden Age of Detective fiction. But in others it was a book full of homicidal maniacs, narcissist and misogynists. The book starts out slow, as all the odious people are introduced. This is a select group of the super-rich and/or super famous that shows up at a little island just off the shore of Britain. The only way in is by helicopter or a road that is only available during low tide. No expense has been spared in this sumptuous Home location. Home is the name of all the club houses throughout the world; all run by Ned Broom and his brother Adam. As the setting and characters are slowly revealed, the back story of Ned and Adam's very successful Home club and of all the protagonists is slowly revealed. There are lots of meltdowns, arguments and fights, and lots of drunken, heinous behaviour as the backstories are slowly revealed. The action takes place over the space of a weekend, and by Sunday morning the whole situation has imploded with violence and mayhem. This is what happens when you get a bunch of greedy, rich and self-important people together with unlimited alcohol and drugs. All of the seven deadly sins are displayed in one way or another and I'm sure there are a few more added to the list as the story unfolds. I can't say that I enjoyed the book. The people were too odious, and it was like watching a train wreck as it all unfolded. I also felt like I had to have a shower whenever I put the book down. The pace of the book picked up as I read, and when I finally closed it, my first thought was that it wasn't too bad a story. Well-crafted and set at a pace that kept me reading. Do I recommend it? I'm not sure, but if you like mysteries that are a little off the wall, you may enjoy this one. This is a Reece's Bookclub book.

[mrs.dubois · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

The plot was slow, with many characters I couldn’t see the importance of, nor care about, at the time they were introduced. As a result I was not invested in this book. The climax was meant to be thrilling, but because I lacked interest my reaction was to the twists were ho-hum. Thank you to Harper and Netgalley for the arc.

[bookworm12_1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

 A fun, murder mystery thriller set on an island. This one was perfect on audio and reminded me so much of The Guest List. Hollywood stars belonging to an exclusive club have secrets and sordid histories that complicate the opening of a new location. It was just what I was in the mood for and I loved each twisty reveal. The different POVs and red herrings made for a fast and entertaining read!

[rmarcin-630843 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

The Club is an exclusive resort run by Ned Groom. His brother, Adam Groom, owns a small stake in the company, which they call HOME. They are planning to open a new resort and anyone who is anyone is invited to attend. It is an exclusive invitation. The staff includes Annie, Nikki, and Jess. When the high profile guests are summoned to a dinner by Ned, they are told of a proposal - which is more of an ultimatum. When bodies start turning up, the party of the year has turned into the murder of the decade! This is a tale of excess, of secrets, of blackmail, and of revenge. I thought the story was slow to start, but then picked up. Once you understood what the guests and the staff were hiding, the story became much more interesting. Yet, none of these people were likeable!Be careful what you wish for - is it really great to be a celebrity and have your life on view 24/7? Who can you trust with your secrets? Does everyone have an ulterior motive? Thanks to NetGalley and Harper Collins for the ARC, all opinions are my own and freely given.

[thepageladies · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

This book has a few things that are a little unusual but that is also what makes this book so entertaining. It is a little slow to get going but once everything starts it is definitely worth sticking with. I also liked the added clips from articles of what really happened on the island. The author did a great job of bringing all of the layers and connections together. Definitely a slow burn mystery with some nice twists and turns!

Thank you Harper for sharing this book with me!