The Search Party by Hannah Richell

Title: The Search Party

Author: Hannah Richell

Genre: Mystery

Publisher: Simon and Schuster

Published: 4^th December 2024

Format: Paperback

Pages: 416

Price: $22.99

Synopsis: Shortlisted for the 2024 Ned Kelly Awards, Best International Crime Fiction

You are invited to:
The Search Party

Join six old friends for one wild weekend at Cornwall’s newest glamping spot.

The guests:
The anxious hosts with everything at stake.
The boho hippies concealing a private darkness.
The TV celebrity with his hot new wife and an even hotter temper.
The exhausted new parents with a secret to hide.
The one that won’t make it home alive . . .

The tents are up. The bonfire is lit. Get ready for one hell of a party.

~*~

Glamping – it’s supposed to be glamourous camping, where there are amenities on-site. It’s what you do for fun if full-on camping isn’t your thing. But this glamping in Cornwall, where six old friends and their families are meeting is anything but fun. The guests are ready to catch up but the bubbling tensions that have been there for a while will eventually fracture the group, and affect everyone.

First, we have the hosts, filled with anxiety because they have put everything into this, and are trying to protect their son at the same time. Kip and his parents, Max and Annie, are grappling with some rather tough issues. Then there are the hippies who have their own secrets, and the TV celebrity and his new wife, grappling with a six-year-old who always gets her way, and a teenager who’d rather be anywhere else. It kicks off with a girl standing on a cliff, before throwing us headfirst into the police investigation on page one, where Dom is at the centre of it all. Slowly, through nine intermingled perspectives that go between the investigation and the devastating weekend, the mystery about what happened, who went missing, who was hurt, and the person that won’t make it home alive become clearer the further you read.

Most books with multiple perspectives that I have read will usually have two or three at most, not nine! What seems overwhelmingly in this regard at first ends up flowing well, because it allows the story to be told from all angles, for the reader to understand motivations and why some characters hold the views they do. And what happened in the friendship group at Kira’s 40^th birthday. Tensions are already bubbling when everyone arrives, and as the weekend goes on, and some of the children like Phoebe, seem to provoke others without facing consequences, threats are thrown about.

But then someone goes missing. And this is where it all gets interesting. Everyone is busy searching for Phoebe, who is the youngest, that nobody seems to notice what happens to another member of their party, nor do they register the danger that person could be in. it means that the mystery we think forms the crux of the novel is solved a little too early. And that’s what makes it work so well. How Hannah Richell has told this engaging story. The layers are created so well, and we get to learn about each character in bits and pieces throughout the novel.

What worked really well was that as a reader, I never really knew who to believe when I was reading this. I was always questioning everyone, trying to work out who knew what, and who had motives. Or who was just standing by and not saying anything. It’s what kept this book moving, the need to find out what happened and hear everyone’s story, to tease at all the threads, even those that felt like they might not be wrapped up neatly. It’s cleverly done to maintain the tension and sense of quiet unrest that the setting gives to the story. It’s a lovely setting, but just like any setting in crime and mystery fiction, is tinged with danger around every corner.

Everything works so well in this book, and highlights that even amongst the most perfect relationships and in the seemingly perfect settings, things can go wrong. Things feel uneasy and it will always be the people that blend in the most we need to be wary of. And I think in this case, having the multiple perspectives is what made it work well. This was a great book from Hannah Richell and she does mystery very well.