The Last One
By Will Dean
Pub Date: August 8, 2023
Atria
Thanks to the author, publisher and NetGalley for the ARC of this book in exchange for my honest opinion.
* thriller, suspense, crime
triggers- if you want to go on a cruise you may never want to again after reading this book
The characters in this book are very well written. These four characters soon discover they have to work together to survive. There are things in our society have gone wrong, I believe this book would make a great movie too.
I recommend this book - but not for the faint.
4 stars

This was such a unique and wild ride of a story!

At the start, I thought it was setting up for something that resembled LOST and I was eager to see the character growth and how they all worked together. But as the story progressed and we reached our first handful of plot twists, I found myself engrossed in something much more unique and entertaining to read.

The characters felt genuine and well flushed out, and I really found myself rooting for them along the way. The prose and writing style was also very digestible and made for a fast-paced thriller.

The only aspect I didn’t love was the length of the book. Not because it felt like some parts dragged on by any means, but for the genre, it seemed longer than necessary.

Overall, I’ll be raving about this unique thriller on Bookstagram and Goodreads leading up to the publication date and I’m excited to read more works by Will Dean in the future!

Holy Sh*t. This book puts the thrill in thriller. It's a wild ride that you just gotta experience for yourself. Oh and I'm never taking a cruise. Ever. Get this one on your must read list!!!

I always love a good thriller and I appreciate the crazy twists and turns. I can truly say that I was caught off-guard by some of the revelations. However, I can also say that I felt some of the content was a bit bizarre. I get perturbed by things that are simply ridiculous added in for shock factor. The ending fell a bit flat but tied things up nonetheless.

Enjoyed reading this. The twists were cleverly plotted and for 99% of the book made perverse sense. My biggest problem is with the ending which is too cute and in the context of a plane doesn’t work. The characters were believable and helped make the bizarre situation work. All in all a very satisfying read, up to the last page.

Um, I’m not even sure what I just read. It’s a bizarre locked room mystery that suffers from poor writing, ridiculous characters and unbelievable twists. This book was not for me!

Mild spoilers below:

It certainly is thought provoking though, in this age of reality TV, YouTube and entertainment.

Thank you NetGalley for an advanced digital
ARC. All opinions are my own.

This is the kind of book that's going to stick with you. Just the pure terror and helplessness of being stuck in the middle of the ocean while a truly bananas thing is happening to you is imagery that will stick with me for a long time. While you have to suspend A LOT of disbelief to get through this one, I could not read it fast enough.

Wow! Books set on boats are like catnip to me. I love the slight uneasiness this setting provides mixed with the opulence and glamour of big ships. This story was full of unpredictability and raised tons of moral questions throughout. I was turning pages as fast as I could and was left with my jaw on the floor. I highly recommend that the reader goes into the story knowing as little as possible and allows themselves to be swept away on this amazing adventure. I would give this one 20 stars if I could. Highly recommended!

I received a copy of this book from Netgalley. All thoughts and opinions are my own.

I do not know how to properly review this one. On the one hand, it was extremely readable (not to be confused with well written though, because this really was not). I powered through this in a day & a half because I absolutely had to know what new crazy thing would happen on the next page.
On the other hand-- this had the silliest plot probably in the history of literature? Without even touching on what actually happened, none of the characters were particularly interesting and it kept taking me right out of the story that Frannie, a 21 year old (?) kept talking like she was quoting psychology textbooks verbatim. People in this story all the time were spouting off random facts in a way that humans just don't speak and it was weird. The call out against ~the dark web~ felt very Crichton-y, which was fun.
Anyway, this book was weird. I'd recommend it as a pretty solid beach read.

So much thankful to Atria Books, Atria/Emily Bestler Books and Netgalley.com for the arc. And thank you my greatest buddy readers to read it together.
The book is quite long but the beauty of it was the fast reading we did. We flew on the pages like crazy and wanted to have answers. I did not like everything in the book but I like anyway how it took our attention. I forgive even the ending couse I felt everything the main chatacter did like I was there on this lets call it adventure. At somepoint I really was sreaming and asking me why?!? How?! But I like I was so involved and was really something much on high level.

Wow, where do I start with The Last One???

This book is the first book in so long that has actually kept me up all night reading. Once everything had kicked off there was no way I was putting it down until I knew what on earth was going on and how it would end! What I loved about it was the fact that it kept switching up the narrative - I thought the story was going one way, then a few chapters later it was heading somewhere else and by the end I still think that there are several ways you could interpret what was happening to Caz. Personally, I think there was a moral message coming through about the pressures and mental toll that certain situations and roles cause for the people involved, but I loved the way this was dealt with under the guise of a horror story. I will certainly not be booking a cruise holiday any time soon!

✨ ℝ𝔼𝕍𝕀𝔼𝕎 ✨
The Last One
•Author: Will Dean
•Rating: ✰✰✰✰✰
•Genre: Thriller

I literally have not stopped thinking about this book since I finished it last night. It was so freaking good and the plot was wild as hell! I super recommend this to anyone who wants a thriller that will keep you on the edge of your seat.

Thank you @netgalley for the ARC!!

𝙎𝙝𝙤𝙧𝙩 𝙨𝙮𝙣𝙤𝙥𝙨𝙞𝙨: Caz and her boyfriend Pete decide to take a much needed vacation. They enjoy night one of the cruise together but when Caz wakes up the next morning there is no one else left on the ship. No crew. No passengers. No one.

This one really picked up! Four people are left abandoned on the sea and find out they’re part of a sick reality show. Omg this book had me so immersed halfway through and I couldn’t put it down!

Thank you to NetGalley and the amazing publisher for the ARC of this title! I am so grateful to be auto-approved for this title!
I look forward to reading and reviewing.

Okay, nope. This was ridiculous and I hated it. I'm sorry, I just simply cannot accept this. And 450 pages of this? That was too much.

This was a fantastic story, that had the misfortune of being a 4.5 star book with that terrible ending. This book was so addictive, and I loved that for the longest time, I had zero idea what was happening aboard the ship. It starts off very ambiguous, and slowly layers are revealed, which reminded me very much of Hunger Games. I felt like there was a lot of back story, including the child she gave up, which didn't ever find closure. Part of me hoped that one of the passengers competing was her daughter, and that there was a reason why she was placed on this ship. The last couple pages were just so unbelievable and frustrating that it dropped from an almost 5 star read down to 3. I thought this book could have done without that last chapter. I was obsessed with Will Dean's first book and raved about it on my channel. It was a gripping 5 star read with unbelievable twists and turns.

I am a victim of thriller blurb betrayal pretty regularly. Almost every single thriller has a blurb that makes things sound very suspicious and mysterious and dangerous and of course make us all wildly curious from the get go as to what is going to happen. And this thriller was no different, I read the blurb about somebody going on a dream vacation cruise and first waking up to find her boyfriend missing, then discovering that everybody on the entire ship was missing and she was essentially floating on a deserted ship alone.

I personally loved this premise, the idea of being trapped on some sketchy mysterious ship out on the middle of the ocean is incredibly claustrophobic and freaky to me, two things that play on some of my biggest fears. I knew the author was a traditional thriller writer, so I knew not to expect anything supernatural a la 'Into the Drowning Deep' which was an utterly amazing ride. So I was hooked immediately, because the abandonment happens nearly right away.

But from there everything just went downhill. The entire premise of the book, the concept of the mysteriously deserted ship, the thing that brought me to this book and caused me to pick it up, basically was revealed/undone almost immediately. So once that reveal hit me I was already drastically less interested, & one of my pet peeves in books is when there's overly modernized language or storyline. I don't want to read about girls being bullied on facebook, or so and so's podcast, or some twitter war, it takes me completely out of the story and comes of like a middle aged mom trying to use the gen z slang and saying that her meatballs are "fire." I didn't dig that element of the story at all.

Another thing that I greatly dislike is when books are just downright unbelievable. I'm not talking fantasy or sci fi or anything supernatural, I'm talking about when the storyline is based in reality and should at least have some semblance of believability but in actuality every single significant plot point is some completely unrealistic that-would-never-happen situation.

I can normally overlook a lot when we have great characters and character development, but that was absolutely stagnant as well. Our MC was supposedly stuck in the trauma of her life, which not to downplay people with real life trauma but there is no growth or moving on from dramatic events if we do nothing but think of them incessantly. Her dramatic but unnecessary backstory (sister is a gambler, father is a degenerate gambler) really did nothing to add or detract from the story and did not pose as an obstacle nor did it serve to spur her towards success. It was just a pointless nothing background that we had to hear about way too much.

The ending was absolutely absurd and undid a lot of what had been written and it basically gave me the impression as some books do as a writer who did not know what story he was going to tell and just wrote himself into corners he couldn't get out of, vs other authors who feel collected and purposeful every step of the way. I wanted to rate this higher but I can't give it more than 2 stars,

Suspend all disbelief in this Squid Game meets The Truman Show novel. Still, it's such a fun ride. Caroline (Caz) and her boyfriend Pete decide to travel to NY via the largest, most glamourous ocean liner out there, The Atlantica. Pete upgrades them to a luxury cabin and they spend the first day exploring the ship, meeting new people at dinner, and settling down for the night in 900+ thread count sheets.
When Caz awakens, Pete is gone. She gets up to go outside, and all the cabin doors are open, beds are made up, everyone is gone, with no trace that they'd been there at all in the first place.
She explores every inch of the ship and realizes she is the only person on board. At first I thought, it must be something supernatural going on here, because how would you disembark hundreds of people in the middle of the night?? Just wanting to know what has happened will propel you along as it gets weirder and weirder.
When it's revealed what is going on it's shocking, clever, and unique. I was imagining the movie playing out in my head. There is great character development, and you are rooting for Caz and others, but disturbed by the predicament they've found themselves in, and at how far it goes. If this is any indication as to how our society is transforming by entertainment like this, we're in big trouble. Just when you think things are about to be resolved, and all the loose ends tied up, boom, an ending that will blow your socks off. It's highly implausible, but clever, and queues the book up for a sequel or series. You certainly want to know how Caz will navigate this next challenge and I hope Mr. Dean takes the time to extend her story in a second book.

There was a lot about this book that I really enjoyed but there was some stuff that I felt could have been left out. I wasn’t a huge fan of any of the characters and actually found a couple of them completely unlivable.. I did love the action and the suspense. The twists and turns were amazing and I didn’t see them coming at all. This book has definitely made me rethink any trips on a cruise ship.

Imagine going to sleep on a cruise ship and waking up completely alone with no clue where the other passengers and crew have gone. As someone who cruises a lot, the basic premise did intrigue me. There are some interesting twists, I will give them that. But did I love it? Not really. Don't get me wrong, some people will love it. But for those of us that happen to go on cruises a lot, there are a lot of inconsistencies that just don't make sense. Plus the big reveal is pretty far fetched to grasp in the real world as something that could really happen without your consent. I'm trying really hard not to give any spoilers away, so I will just say this, I would sue someone if this scenario happened to me.. The emotional trauma alone just seems more than the characters should have to endure in this type of scenario.

The book does flow pretty quickly so I finished it in a day and a half, which is always a plus. It is one of those rushed endings where everything is just wrapped up quickly. The final scenes do hint at a possible part 2 at some point, that I doubt I would read at this point.