I am a huge fan of Jo Spain, so was delighted to receive an ARC copy of her latest novel
As usual, Jo’s work did not disappoint
The book is set in Lapland, where a UK tourist, Vicky, has been found dead. Her brother, Alex, flies from England to Lapland to find out what has happened to his sister
All is not what it seems in the small town of Koppeland and in his own investigations, he finds that Vicky is not the first woman to go missing!
Working with the Chief of Police, Alex wants answers and he is not prepared to leave until he has got them
Admittedly, I am not the biggest fan of Scandi crime, but this book was soo good. I found it so hard to put down with so much going on
I loved the way that Jo Spain threw a real red herring with the suspect
I loved all of the twists and turns in this book and the ending was extremely clever
This book is a dark novel with a great storyline
Thank you to the publishers for a gifted copy

Jo Spain never disappoints. When Alex finds out that his sister Vicky has died in Finland, he travels to Koppe, the small town where her body was pulled from a lake, to repatriate her. But, when he finds out that his sister was murdered, he stays and joins the investigation. Agatha, the detective in charge of the investigation, tells him everything she can about the case, the possible suspects, and the town, from which three other women have disappeared. Alex starts to follow his own leads and investigate several tourists, coworkers, and people living in the area.

The Last to Disappear is cleverly plotted and perfectly paced, with fascinating characters and an intriguing setting. It's a nordic noir but written by an Irish author, giving it a very unique perspective from one of the best Irish crime writers. The result is a mystery full of twists with very well-written characters.

Lapland is a wonderful place and for the people that love snow is magic. In this book is not so nice. There happens bad things, I could say stupid but I want. People are sad and people are jalous, sometimes you can not do anything to defeat destiny. And I was mostly sad about this characters but and the end of the tunel there was light. After all bad moments there was something worth of going on. Something that warm also your heart after the final action. Brothers and sisters, friends, lovers... all as their stories, all have secrets, all discover and all hide something. Mystery mixed with crime procedures was with me for few days. Thank you Jo Spain, Querques books and Netgalley for this arc.

I've read and enjoyed Jo Spain's previous books. I also very much enjoy a Scandi thriller so I was especially looking forward to this combination, a Scandi crime novel by one of my favourite Irish crime writers. It did not disappoint and The Last To Disappear is now my favourite Jo Spain book.
Alex is a successful hardworking London professional. He receives a phone call from his father in the middle of the night. His younger sister Vicky has been pulled from an Icy Lake in Northern Lapland. Upon hearing the news of the death of Vicky, their mother suffers a heart attack and is hospitalized and Alex has to travel to Lapland alone to bring his sister home. Alex initially assumes his sister accidentally drowned. His relationship with his sister has been strained as her life is so different to his. Upon travelling to the luxury winter resort Vicky was working in, he meets the chief of police, Agatha Koskinin and learns that his sister was in fact murdered and that she is the third woman to go missing from this small town but the only one confirmed dead. Alex and Agatha end up initially clashing but in time work together to try to find out what really happened to Vicky and the secrets hidden in this remote icy town begin to unveil themselves.
This was a really compulsive, unputdownable book. I loved the setting. I have read a lot about Rovaniemi in recent years, usually holiday reviews accompanied by beautiful happy photographs of families visiting Lapland. I am always intrigued about locations that rely heavily on tourism about what life must be like for the local residents and Lapland is probably the most intriguing of them all. I loved the atmospheric setting, the vivid descriptions and reading about the residents of the small town of Koppe. 
The main characters are really well drawn and I was wholly invested in their lives and what was going to  happen. All the various strands of the story weave together with a fast paced  suspense filled plot that kept me guessing. A fantastic read.
4.5 stars.

I am already looking forward to Jo Spain's next book.

Jo Spain is one of my favourite authors and I recommend every single.one of her books. Especially this one, definitely my favourite one. This is my first psychological thriller set in Finland and I loved the setting. The story and the setting ate magical. Highly recommended five big stars ☆☆☆☆☆

There are some authors that when I hear they’ve a new book coming out I don’t even need to read the blurb, I just want to dive straight into the book. Jo Spain is one of these authors. The Last to Disappear is an chilling and atmospheric crime thriller. When I say ‘chilling’ I really mean it as this book is set in Lapland. When we think of Lapland most of us think of Father Christmas, cosy log cabins , sleds being pulled by husky dogs and we think how lovely it all is. From the start of this book I was completely hooked and was drawn right into the story. At times I felt like I was there so good were the descriptions of the people and places. Often in a crime thriller like this one I can pick out the perpetrator very early on and it sometimes feels then like an anti climax when it’s revealed. However with this book I made a few guesses but I was wrong on every count and this to me is the sign of an excellent author. I can’t recommend The Last to Disappear highly enough. Jo Spain has completely smashed it again. 5⭐️

I really enjoyed this latest book from one of my favourite authors. I have read all her books and this one did not disappoint. It was a thriller will a lot of twists and turns that kept the reader enthralled until the end. Highly recommended.

Many thanks to netgalley and Jo Spain for the advanced copy of this book. I agreed to give my unbiased opinion voluntarily.

Jo Spains latest, and she doesn't disappoint. Absolutely loved it, very gripping read. Fantastic characters.

This is a great read and what I like about Jo Spain is that all of her books are very different and have a completely different tone. This is cold and calculating set in a freezing place which gets colder when a body is found in the lake. Gripping stuff and the writing is spot on.

Jo Spain is such a powerhouse in the psychological thriller genre that whenever she publishes a new book I don’t even have to think twice about picking it up. However, I have to admit that the first half of The Last to Disappear proved somewhat of a struggle for me.

Alex’s sister, Vicki, is found dead in a frozen lake in Lapland. Alex travels to the small town where his sister lived and worked, and teams up with detective Agatha Koskinen to find out what happened to his sister. Vicki wasn’t the first person to go missing in this town but at least her body was discovered, whereas what happened to the other three women remains a mystery. As is always the case, many of the residents in this small and isolated town hide a multitude of secrets. But is there a serial killer among them? Or is the killer a tourist, who is now long gone?

Some of the chapters take us back to 1998, where we meet Kaya. She’s a young woman who has found herself in a loveless marriage and is trapped in a life she never even wanted. But what does her story have to do with the rest of the story and what happened to her? I thoroughly enjoyed finding out and Kaya is for sure a character you root for from the moment you meet her.

So, Jo Spain goes scandi-noir. I feel she definitely succeeded in pulling off that particular sense of atmospheric isolation that the books in that genre seem to do so well. I could almost feel the cold deep down in my bones and imagine the struggle of making my way through all that snow and quite possible getting utterly lost. But on the other hand, I fail to see the need for an author like her to jump on this whole “isolated, claustrophobic, covered in snow and ice location” bandwagon. It’s popular, I get it. It’s also, in my most humble opinion, always achieved best by the Scandinavian authors themselves. And in Jo Spain’s case, I feel she comes across as way more authentic when her stories are set in Ireland.

It took me quite a long time to get into The Last to Disappear. The scene has to be set so you get a sense of time and place, I get it. The characters have to be introduced, some slightly more likeable than others. However, for the longest time it felt as if very little of consequence was happening and the story wasn’t really moving forward. I never considered giving up because this is Jo Spain after all and ultimately it isn’t her fault.

Perseverance paid off in the end, though. When the various threads of the story came together and the fate of these women became apparent, I was most definitely glad I stuck with it. There are some things I feel I should have worked out on my own, but I didn’t. I liked Agatha’s backstory and how it came together with the general storyline, especially because I failed to see the relevance. Actually, I thought Agatha as a whole was a fantastic character and a refreshing take on a detective/chief of police. No cliches here.

So, I had a little bit of a wobble with The Last to Disappear but I blame my reading mood. Slow-burners and I are currently apparently not getting on. However, I do love Jo Spain’s writing and the plot, while moving slowly, is remarkably well done. Like I said, I enjoyed the atmosphere and there are a ton of secrets to discover. The Last to Disappear has a little bit of everything : psychological thriller, police procedural, mystery … Best of all, it all makes sense in the end. None of those twists that come out of the blue and barely ever make sense, none of that “yeah, right” rolling of the eyes, none of that suspending belief crap … and that in itself is a huge bonus. And as always, it is definitely making me look forward to reading more from Jo Spain.

No-one will ever accuse Jo Spain of being unadventurous. With a best-selling series of police procedurals under her belt - the superb Tom Reynolds novels - a lesser writer might hunker down and play safety first by sticking to the familiar. But that's not Jo Spain. Her last standalone thriller, The Perfect Lie was set in Newport, Rhode Island, and now she takes us to the ski resort of Koppe in icy Finland, where Brit Alex Evans has travelled to identify the murdered body of his sister, Vicky. She was something of a 'free spirit', having wandered half the way round Europe doing a variety of temporary jobs (including pole dancing in a Spanish bar), always broke, but always looking for the next big adventure. Her body has been found by an ice fisherman, and has been in the water for some time.

Handling the investigation is local police chief Agatha Koskinen, but Alex is determined to ask his own questions. He discovers that Vicky had been working at a local  hotel and had made friends with an American tourist who is now back in the states, but has an alibi for the time when Vicky disappeared. Agatha has demons of her own to contend with, however, as somewhere out there is the abusive parent of her three children - Luca - and she fears for them should Luca come back into their lives.

As ever, Jo Spain weaves a complex mystery, and gives us a split time narrative. She takes us back to 1998 where we are a fly on the wall in the house of Miika and Kaya Vartinen. Miika is a Sami - one the ethnic people of what used to be known as Lapland. He is a reindeer herder. Kaya is pregnant, but Miika is not the father. She is carefully managing the usual symptoms so that when she tells him,  Miika will believe the child is his.

The significance of the book's title becomes clear when Alex visits Agatha at her home, and she reveals that Vicky is the latest woman to disappear in a ten-year period, and that Kaya Vatinen was the first. She also tells Alex that Miika Vartinen is widely suspected as being involved in the disappearances, but no evidence has ever emerged to connect him to the cases.

With the most delicate of touches, Jo Spain hints at the darker aspects of life in Koppe, where there is an undercurrent of racism towards the Sami people, and she reminds us of the familiar theme of movers and shakers in tourist resorts - think the Mayor of Amity Island in Jaws -  not wanting anything to disturb the inward flow of visitors and their cash. There is also the spectre of an international mining company sensing a million dollar windfall from the minerals sitting beneath the pristine and picturesque Finnish landscape.

Jo Spain's tricksy thrillers are very cleverly written. She relies on us making assumptions. She invites us to make these assumptions rather like a fly fisherman casting the cunningly constructed fly on the water, hoping it will fool the fat trout (aka the reader). When we realise we have been gulled, we might turn back a few ages and react with something like, "hang on - didn't she tell us that ...?", only to find that what she wrote was  perfectly ambiguous, and that we have jumped to the wrong conclusion. Perhaps there's a few too many mixed metaphors there, but I hope you get my drift.

There are only two predictable things about a Jo Spain thriller. The first? There will be a dramatic plot twist. The second? You won't see it coming! The Last to Disappear is published by Quercus, and will be out on 12th May.

I'm always happy when I read a new Jo Spain book as she writes gripping, highly entertaining, and cleverly plotted story.
I was a bit wary when I read about the Lapland setting as I'm not the biggest fan of Scandinavian noir, but I was hooked after some pages.
This is a slow burning, well written, and twisty mystery with a dual timeline and a couple of very interesting MC.
Alex and Agatha are well developed, complex, clever, and faulted. They are both facing personal problems but they're also very clever.
Alex lost his sister; Agatha is the detective.
The slow burning plot introduce the characters, the setting, and I was involved in the plot turning pages and being surprised by the twists.
It was an excellent reading experience: the solid plot kept me hooked and I couldn't guess the solution.
Highly recommended.
Many thanks to riverrun and Netgalley for this ARC, all opinions are mine

Great read. Sucked me in from the first page. Vicky’s body is discovered by a fisherman under the ice in Lapland. Her brother Alex travels to repatriate her body following what the family assume is a tragic accident, but quickly things take on a much more sinister turn. Brilliantly written, you can feel the intense cold and the suspicion surrounding who may have not only been responsible for Vicky’s death but that of other historical deaths too. Great characters, lots of twists and turns and a very interesting setting

The Last to Disappear is a really enjoyable thriller from Jo Spain. It had enough twists and turns to keep me guessing and the setting of the book was fantastic. I practically devoured it.

Thank you to NetGalley and Quercus Books for my ARC.

4-5 stars

A body in the ice of Lake Inari near Koppe in Finnish Lapland, a Christmas party in London and a phone call. What's the link? The body is Vicky Evans brother of party goer Alex, the call is from their father who later insists that Alex travel to Finland to bring Vicky home. As Vicky is an adrenaline junkie and full of joi de vivre Alex assumes she's had an accident but not so, it's murder. The case is investigated by Agatha Koskinen, the Chief of Police in Koppe.

I always begin a Jo Spain with an eager sense of anticipation and with this one, even more so as a lover of a Scandi! What a great combination and what's not to relish! This is a mulilayered mystery in the most amazing setting which takes the storytelling to another level. You feel as if you are there on the snowmobile with Agatha and Alex, watching the Northern Lights, anticipating the huskie sled ride, feeding lichen to the reindeer but I may pass on the reindeer Pizza! You get a real flavour of the area and the people too although beneath the christmasy atmosphere lurks an abundance of secrets some as dark as a winter Finnish day.

The characterisation is excellent, Alex is a bubbling cauldron of anger and guilt, he lacks trust and initially doesn't seem likeable but he grows on you. I think Lapland works its magic and softens his edges. Agatha has trauma in her past but she's fantastic and I'd love to read another novel featuring her.

There's a lot going on in this small tourist spot, the plot is really good with the different strands deepening the mystery but also weave together cleverly and the pace is spot on giving plenty of tension and suspense. The author also gives the reader good plot twists and takes us down some blind alleys but it comes together in a very dramatic, breath taking ending.

This is a well thought out and compelling page turner with the added bonus of the flavour of a Scandi thriller in the vein of someone like Jo Nesbo.

With thanks to NetGalley and especially to Quercus Books for the much appreciated arc in return for an honest review.

Wow! What a read, I really loved it.

This is the first book I’ve read from Jo Spain and I wasn’t disappointed. I was gripped from start to finish. The book was an absolute page turner.

The story alternates between 2019 where Alex Evans finds out his sister Vicky has died in Northern Lapland and then in 1998 with Chief of police Agatha who learns of 3 other missing women. It is well written with wonderful descriptions of the setting in Koppe, Lapland, with interesting characters, it’s unpredictable and a fast paced plot that keeps you guessing, with an unexpected twist.

This is a great read, I couldn’t put it down. I look forward to reading more by Jo Spain. Highly recommend this for readers who enjoy thrilling, mystery and police procedural books.

I would like to thank #NetGallery, #QuercusBooks and the author #JoSpain for my eARC of #TheLastToDisappear in exchange for an honest review.

This was a great setting for a book, the icy atmosphere of Lapland.
While this was a great read it definitely doesn’t fit as a thriller for me. The three time perspectives it were told in were great but somehow this just missed the “thrill”.

Alex has travelled to Koppe, in traumatic circumstances, he has just found out his mother has had a heart attack, which was brought on by her finding out her daughter, his sister had been murdered.

The book looks deeply at the entire town and the culture that Alex’s sister Vicky had been working in at the lodge.

Agatha is the detective on the case and the chief of police, and it is nice to see Alex going from finding her too young and inexperienced, to finding her helpful and teaming up with her.

Great book, if a little long.

This was a great slow burning stock, jammed packed with action as it neared its end. I enjoyed the two time frames and had no idea who dunnit or how it would be tied up.

Another thoroughly enjoyable book from Jo Spain, one of my favourite authors.

Alex receives a distressing call from his father and then he is on his way to Lapland to bring home the body of his sister Vicky who has drowned. Alex and his family are devastated and they want to find out how this could possibly have happened. Vicky was a very lively girl, full of personality and spontaneity. He meets Agatha, the detective in charge of the case, and due to the small size of their workforce investigating the death Alex has huge doubts as to the competency of this team.

Not long after his arrival it is discovered that three other women have also gone missing. Alex is feeling terrible as his sister had tried to contact him and he had not returned the calls, he is now sure she was in trouble and reaching out for help.

I loved the characters in the book, each had depth and as the story moved forward I wanted to know more about each of them. A well paced plot that had me engaged until the very end and I did not guess the final twist. I would definitely recommend this book to others, a five star read.

Thank you to Netgalley, the the author and publisher for a copy of the book in exchange for an unbiased review.

The Last to Disappear - Jo Spain

Massive thanks to Netgalley and Quercus Books and the author Jo Spain for the opportunity to read this advanced reading copy of Jo's latest book (due to be published on 12th May) in exchange for an honest review.

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WOW!!!!
Where to start with this one!

Jo Spain is one of those authors that make me want to drop everything the moment she releases a new book, rush out and get it and sit down to read it immediately! So I was absolutely thrilled when I was approved an ARC of her latest book #TheLastToDisappear. (Thanks again Netgalley and Quercus Books.)

This book is an absolute page turner from start to finish. It is so well written with a wonderfully descriptive setting (Lapland) - the harsh weather conditions add to the tension for sure, the scenarios are entirely plausable and the characters are so well developed and entirely believable.

'The Last to Disappear' is the perfect mix of thriller, mystery and police procedural and will suck you in from the very first chapter.
I just couldnt put it down!!! I read it in one sitting and just had to keep reading on to find out what happened.

I love a good fast paced thriller and find a lot of them can end up being a bit predictable or far fetched. This one was neither of those things. It was full of twists and turns and will defo keep you guessing right until the end.

I've never read a book by Jo Spain I didnt love - She just never disappoints.

Make this book one you MUST read if you love a good thriller!!!

I will be recommending this one to everyone and have already pre ordered my physical copy to add to my bookshelves ❤️

An easy 5 stars from me
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