I'm not usually a fan of different narratives within a book but it worked well within this story. This book gets right into your mind as you frantically try and work out who the culprit is.
This is a creepily atmospheric book that I very much enjoyed. Wonderful ending that caught me by surprise!

The range of different narratives in this story made it somewhat confusing at times, however this was well written and had an interesting plot that held my interest.

With lots of suspense, this book really plays on your fears as much of it takes place in a deep dark wood 😱
I thought the way it was written was very clever - with each of the friends telling their story, intertwined with the Detective piecing together the events - the reader can gradually build up an idea but everyone remains a suspect until the end!
The plot moves at a good pace and the story keeps you on the edge of your seat, then ends with an excellent twist (or two!). This should definitely be on your wish list if you like a good suspense/psychological thriller. I rated it 4⭐️.

16 year old Sadie Saunders is missing and her friends believe that not enough is being done to find her so they set out on a fateful trip into the woods to try and find some answers. However, each of her friends Cora, Abigail, Fash, Mason and her twin brother Luke seem to be hiding secrets of their own.

On the other side of the coin Detective Fleet has his own demons to face when he is tasked with finding the answers to this case whilst having to relive his own nightmare past in the same town.

The Search Party follows a lot of different narratives and each one is filled with suspense and makes you want to read on to find how what happened to Sadie. At times the formatting on the Kindle was difficult to read but I was still drawn into the suspense of this book.

The ending was pretty shocking and I would love to read more with Fleet.

A missing girl. A police officer with a history in the community. A search party of the girls' friends - and there is a search for them and more. There were plenty of elements that kept me interested but it was a clunky story. But the ending was satisfactory just not surprising.

I am a big fan of Simon Lelic and his latest novel did not disappoint. Sixteen year old Sadie Saunders has been missing for six days and her friends think the police are looking for her in the wrong place. The inhabitants of the town where she lived think she has been murdered and they have a strong idea who the culprit is. Her six friends decide to form a search party and head off into the woods to look for her. Two days later a panicked phone call is made to the emergency services and when the police find the location of the call they faced with four distraught teenagers and a dead body but it is not the missing girl. Something has gone badly wrong.

This is an engrossing thriller which keeps you guessing. All the teenagers in the search party have something to hide and the tantalising drip-feed of their secrets makes for great reading. The story is told from multiple viewpoints including those of the teenagers and DI Robin Fleet, who is a particularly interesting character with a curious backstory. The plot is excellent, the characterisation is realistic and the ending is very clever indeed. I highly recommend The Search Party.

Thank you to NetGalley and Penguin for an ARC in exchange for an honest review.

The drama. The self-absorbtion. The illogical decisions. Boy, did every single member of "The Search Party" play their parts annoyingly well!

They sniped, they griped, and they harped their way through a series of alternating monologic interviews like true professionals (or a fraying band of ‘besties’).

These individual ‘unburdenings’ provide a series of intimate reveals into the group’s dynamics. This approach allowed me to experience ‘real-time’, fly-on-the-wall accounts of the differing POVs surrounding their friend’s mysterious disappearance, while constantly challenging the judgements I formed about their characters.

This style of narration did take a little while to settle into, and their personalities may have bled my attention dry on every page(!), but this made being in Fleet’s company an absolute breeze.

Yep. The main investigator was an interesting and hugely likeable bloke with a very intriguing background. To be honest it would be a crime for him not to appear in another story in future, as his quietly memorable presence and credible flaws have great prospects.

"The Search Party" is a cleverly told collection of candid accounts that are fed by the fever of heated moments. It certainly held my attention, but not too many surprises.

A group of five 16-year-olds sets off into the woods to search for Sadie, their missing friend, because they suspect the police are looking in the wrong area. They become lost and disorientated and when the police do eventually find them, they are indeed with a dead body although it's not who you'd think!

The story is told from multiple viewpoints and quite a bit is revealed in flashback, or rather in the form of one-sided police interviews. An interesting technique that works well once the reader gets into the flow. The teenagers all have problems and secrets of their own, which are cleverly revealed along the way.

The author must have a poor opinion of parenting skills since none of this group's parents come out well, being either drunk, violent, neglectful or over-protective. The teenagers themselves are realistically portrayed (rather selfish, jealous and perhaps a bit too street-wise, although considering their parents perhaps it fits) but I didn't feel that their voices / speech patterns were dissimilar enough and had to keep checking back to remind myself who was being interviewed.

The main character is DI Robin Fleet, brilliantly portrayed as someone with a lot of personal demons. Returning to his home town and the site of a personal tragedy might sound like a well-trodden path but it works here. His sidekick DS Nicky Collins was the colleague you'd most like to have around on a difficult case and I hope we hear more from both these characters. Their boss Superintendent Burton - overly concerned with budgets, the media and "getting a result" - provided the "annoying comic relief" who got everyone's back up without even trying.

The book is very atmospheric, being set in an end-of-season seaside tourist town and the nearby creepy woodland, mostly at night. Unusually for me, I did guess the ending (or most of it) but this did not detract from the enjoyment of reading this book. Highly recommended.

A group of friends from a search party to try and find their missing friend Sadie.
They’re are twists and turns and you wonder what will happen next.
Will Sadie be found? What else do they stumble upon?
A gripping read

This book is about 5 teenagers who go out on a search party to find their friend Sadie who has went missing. They go into the woods but when they are eventually found by the police, they're found beside a dead body...and it's not Sadie.

The book starts after the events have unfolded and is told in a mixture of 3rd person narrative (what the main police inspector Robin Fleet has been investigating) and 1st person (the interview transcript with each of the teenagers).

Due to this being an advance copy, I suspect that it's not the final draft that will be released. Due to this the formatting wasn't easy to read on my kindle - there were no distinct chapters, sometimes the 3rd person narrative tacked on immediately to the end of a 1st person sentence which got confusing and some of the dialogue took new sentences when it shouldn't and vice versa. I assume this will be fixed for the release copy.

The 3rd person narrative parts were written well, and Rob and his colleague Nicky were likeable characters. I found that I did care for Rob as the story went forward and I wanted him to get to the bottom of everything that had happened and find out about his past in this town.

The 1st person narrative took more getting used to. Each of the teenagers told the story in their own words in a police interview but we were reading what they were saying without "hearing " the police asking the questions. It was an interesting way of writing and had the added intrigue of whether any or all of them were reliable narrators or not. The only issue to this is that they were all fairly hostile towards the police and so I didn't have any sympathy for them.

As for the twist, I'm sorry to say I wasn't overly impressed. I don't want to give anything away *no spoilers* but it seemed unlikely and I dont believe that the police wouldn't have discovered a specific part of it quite quickly at the start of the investigation.

All in all, I did enjoy the book and would recommend it, but the ending did leave me feeling a bit disappointed.

I was really looking forward to reading this book so when I did start reading it I was really disappointed that I struggled to get into it.I liked the police officers but found the children to be quite annoying .Usually I am fine with stories being told from different points of view but it just didn't click with me this time.Can't win them all I guess, and this one didn't hit the spot for me.

Thank you to NetGalley and Penguin General UK - Fig Tree, Hamish Hamilton, Viking, Penguin Life, Penguin Business for this Arc of this book before release❤️

And thank you to the Author Simon Lelic for writing this sensational book❤️

A group of friends form what they call the search party as there 16 year old friend Sadie Saunders goes missing... These people include Sadie's boyfriend, brother, Sadie's 2 closest girlfriends, boyfriends best friend

Mason Payne, Sadie's boyfriend gets accused and the blame as of his possessive and Violent tendencies, he is living with his abusive father who is also a alocholic , his mother abandoned him so is he really like this father or not?....

Told through many Perspectives, and the group end up falling out and apart as not sure who to trust and who is telling the truth ... Secrets come out.... Then... Accidents happen..

This book is really gripping and keeps you guessing and gets you thinking who to trust and not to trust, this is my first book by Simon Lelic and I loved it so much, I will be looking into read other books by Simon Lelic
Well done Simon Lelic for an amazing and sensational rollercoast of a ride!
Will recommend on Amazon etc once published
Definitely recommend
5 stars out of 5 definitely ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

Since I enjoyed Simon Lelic’s previous novel “The House” and the way in which it was written, I was looking forward to reading his latest book “The Search Party”. The plot is exactly as the title says, sixteen year old Sadie Saunders has gone missing and her five friends form a search party to look for her in the woods. Only they’re not just her friends, they are also suspects and not all of them will make it out alive.
The story is written between days six and ten of the search with the friends relating what happened on each of the days through one sided police interviews. We also see alternating chapters with Detective Inspector Robert Fleet and his DS, Nicola Collins, as they try to work out where everything went wrong and what has actually happened to the missing girl. Once again as in most police procedurals, the story features a detective that is fighting his own demons after he returns to his home town and the memories of an event concerning his sister. Saying that, I liked Fleet, I felt he was genuine and moralistic and his comaraderie with Nicola really worked for me. I also thought the police interviews with the friends were intriguing and clearly narrated and I fully pictured the whole scenario with clarity.
My only gripe with it all, was the fact that the friends were quite young, just about to start sixth form and for me, they were far more mature and street wise than their sixteen years of age.
The denouement to Sadie and the ending featuring Fleet was just perfect and I liked how the author made it so that Fleet could return in a future book. I found this book to be easy to read and understand, enjoyable and I’d happily read more by this author again.

4 stars

Read this book in 2 days and really enjoyed it. Lots of twists and turns and kept me gripped. From discovering a young girl had gone missing, to her friends going on a search party for her and trouble around most corners, I was gripped

When sixteen year old Sadie goes missing a group of her friends decide to form a search party to find her. The chapters are told from their perspectives which I thought was clever and the story was fast paced

The plot is based on a group of friends and the consequences of their mistakes and the detective who is investigating one of their group going missing and is written from each of the main characters’ perspective. It took a few chapters to get into it but then keeps you hooked, wanting to know what has happened. Some of it is a bit unplauseable but could be excused because it’s the main characters’, who are children, reactions to the situation they find themselves in. An enjoyable read but not sure how old the children were.

This is a crime story that uses the technique of drip feeding the key information. This is a well used format which works well if used sparingly. However every significant moment or critical piece of information is told in this way, which is irritating. I found myself not really caring by about half way through, which is a shame as I’ve always enjoyed Simon Lelic’s books in the past but this format wasn’t my cup of tea. However other readers may feel differently.

Sadie Saunders is missing - presumed dead - and her five best friends are determined to find out the truth.

Her boyfriend, her best friends, her brother and her boyfriend's best friend are convinced that the cops are looking in the wrong place. They form a search party and set off into the woods, keen to find out the truth.

However, each of the teens is hiding a secret of their own - and they know more about Sadie's past than they're caring to admit. And it isn't long until the cops are called - and the police discover a body. One that isn't Sadie's.

The kind of thriller that you won't be able to put down, the book is primarily told from the perspectives of the cops investigating the case and the five teenagers. It alternates between uncovering what happened in the woods and the present day, adding another layer to the whodunnit aspect of the thriller.

The tension and paranoia increases with each turn of the page, leading everything to come to a head with a wait-did-that-really-just-happen reveal and an ending that will keep the reader guessing.

I thoroughly enjoyed this book. Unpredictable but entertaining, it kept me gripped right to the ending which I didn’t see coming.

I was looking for a book like Lucy Foley's The Hunting Party and this provided it - excellent fun, good characters, moody atmosphere. The ideal lockdown read.