Review of The Last, by Hanna Jameson
Jon Keller was on a trip to Switzerland when nuclear war brought the world as we know it to an end. Trapped in a remote hotel with a motley group of guests and staff, Jon is desperate to find out what happened to his family back home in the USA.
But when the body of a child is discovered, Jon suspects there might be a murderer among the group and he’s determined to find out who it is. As secrets and suspicion begin to grow, relationships become strained and violence is never far away.
I’ve seen a lot about this book on Twitter over the last few months and was excited to get hold of an advance copy. But the story actually took me by surprise. I obviously didn’t do my research before reading, I had the impression this was an Agatha Christie style mystery where the hotel residents died one by one. Nope.
Instead this is a story much more about the psychology of the end of the world. And it manages to be both claustrophobic and incredibly creepy. Jon was travelling alone to a conference when nuclear war resulted in the destruction of cities around the world. He becomes a central figure in the group but finds it hard to trust all the people around him, especially as the story progresses.
Trapped in the near abandoned hotel, with its empty rooms and vast surrounding forest, Jon succumbs to paranoia.
There are also supernatural elements to the story that twist and darken things. They might be real, but they might also be figments of the hotel residents’ imaginations as they struggle to accept this abrupt end to their lives, their world. But these haunting glimpses drew me further into the story, ramping up the sense of unease. It’s easy to imagine how it would feel to live in the hotel, afraid of what remains outside and what might be watching.
The story was compelling and I found myself reading on until late in the night, but I was a bit dissatisfied with the ending. After everything Jon and his companions go through, a surprising truth about the outside world brings an abrupt change to the direction of the story. It also reveals a few truths about Jon that he had neglected to share. These facts made his character more rounded, but they wrong footed me so close to the end. I would have preferred to learn about Jon’s past sooner, to give his emotional turmoil another layer.
But this dissatisfaction isn’t necessarily a bad thing, because it reflects Jon’s own journey. I don’t want to give away the ending, but it doesn’t provide the neat conclusion he might have wished for. It clearly shows him as a flawed human being. There are no heroes in this story.
The Last doesn’t dwell too much on what caused the world to end, but it does lay the blame at the feet of a particular politician and those that voted for him. The anger at the people and events that might have done this is visceral and it’s not a huge leap from the real world.
This is an immersive read that sucked me in and kept me turning the pages for hours at a time. A chilling mystery that will make you think about how you would face the end of the world – and what you’d do afterwards.
Find out more
The Last on Goodreads
The Last on Amazon
This post contains affiliate links. I received a complimentary advance copy of this book from the publisher via Netgalley, for the purpose of review, but all opinions are my own.