Everyone’s Dying to Join…
The Club follows The Home Group, a collection of exclusive party locations that attract the rich and wealthy on a global level. The group’s very latest project is The Island Home, an island location transformed into the very height of luxury where celebrities flock for spa treatments, ultra relaxation and the parties of the century. This time around however all is not well within the group and soon enough reports are coming through of missing staff members, major disturbances and even dead bodies in the water. With so much at stake here can the heart of the problem be found and destroyed before it spreads or will this very latest party be the island’s last?
For starters I really enjoyed the titular club atmosphere here, The Home was posed as this ‘must-be’ place for the rich and wealthy and Lloyd was really able to showcase the hustle and bustle that went into running such a place. Through the different POV’s from the staff we got a real behind the scenes look into club life as well as the dirty secrets of the dangerously rich and I liked how hectic this book was, it really felt like the super successful business that it was painted to be.
Mystery wise however this book did fall flat and it’s almost like the murder plotline was an afterthought. The narrative had an incredibly slow start and even when we got around to Ned’s disappearance it was only really hinted or speculated at until the very last few chapters, instead it felt like the main goal here was to describe how amazing the club was in as much detail as possible. Instead of any real investigating we just got daily club life from our four POV narrators, so much so that any major plot revelations were sort of just swept under the rug. There was a part of the story where something major was revealed but it was dropped so casually into conversation that I almost skimmed over it because it just register as important to the story.
Speaking of the four POV narrators here whilst I did enjoy each character and their own personal secrets and personalities it also felt like there wasn’t really a protagonist and instead we were just following four random employees who all needed some serious development. Like I said each of the four was interesting enough but constantly rotating between them in under 350 pages meant that we never really got to know them properly, which was a shame because they were decent characters to follow.
Overall this is a tricky one for me because whilst I enjoyed the characters and atmosphere created here the actual narrative and mystery element fell completely flat and at times it was like I was reading a club brochure instead of a mystery novel. Lloyd seemed more concerned with showcasing how amazing this place was rather than building up an actual story and so by the end of the book I felt a little underwhelmed, it was a bit of a disappointment,
Ramblings of a Supposed Writer 