Welcome to paradise. We hope you survive your stay...

Because someone has discovered Cass’s dark secret, and on an island as remote as this, there aren’t many places to hide. There is a killer waiting, and whoever it is will stop at nothing until Cass’s life is ruined and justice is finally served.

Slow burn mystery set out on a small island. A group of permanent residents that work at a resort that has now had two suspicious deaths. It was a fun listen to try to figure out “whodunit”. I enjoyed the remote setting and twists. I struggled a little bit keeping up with Cass and Brookes POV because I found the narrators voices to be very similar. The middle got to be a little slow, but the twist in the end was a shocker!

🌴 The Resort - Sara Ochs

3 ⭐️ - This was good! If you like deserted islands, dead bodies, and mysterious characters, this one’s for you. This would be a good book to break up your beachy light reads this summer! Look for this one hitting shelves on 2/13!


I read a lot of thrillers and while a lot of them have twins and turns that surprise me, this one felt a little predictable. The characters are unreliable, liars, and mysterious. The changing POV helps give this book a quick, suspicious vibe that makes you want to keep reading. Trust no one but yourself! If you’re a Lucy Foley fan, you’ll enjoy this one!
Thank you Netgalley, RB Media, and Sourcebooks Landmark for the early listener and reader copies! This one is also a February Book of the Month pick!

Escape to paradise but don’t stay too long. Someone is making sure visitors never leave — one murder at a time.

The Resort starts as a slow burn but quickly picks up after another body is found during a scuba dive. Every character has their secrets and reasons for hiding out in the idyllic remote party island in Thailand. I found myself suspicious of all the characters throughout the entire book!

The ending is action packed, and I couldn’t stop listening. It’s full of surprises and suspense. The unpredictable finish is impossible to guess.

There are multiple POVs in this murder mystery thriller. The four different narrators made it easy to follow. The Resort is an entertaining and engaging listen even when the plot gets a bit convoluted in places.

Overall, The Resort is a fun escape listen.

Book Review: The RESORT
STARS: 4 X 5
Author: Sara Ochs @saraochsauthor
Publisher: @sourcebooks
Thank you @netgalley for this ARC.

There is a fictional party island call Koh Sang in Thailand. It is that place you go to get from all and start anew. This is what Cass has done. She moved to this island to forget her past. She fell in love with a fellow “permanent” named Logan and found a family with the other workers at the resort.

Instagram Influencer and Blogger Brooke arrives on the island. Just before Brooke arrived a woman accidentally fell to her death. After being on the island a few weeks and getting to know all the permanents another body of a tourist is found in the ocean when Cass is out with her scuba diving students.

Cass and Brooke start to investigate these two deaths. The two of them start to get cryptic messages warning them to about their investigation. They do not let these warnings distract them and when a few more deaths occur, they start to get scared. There are so many secrets that the permanent a keeping, it occurs to them that one of them could be the killer. Both Cass and Brooke have secret motives about looking into these killings. Will they turn on each other and will they find the killer before another person is killed?

This books starts out slow and a bit confusion with the introduction of so many characters. The book is written from each of Cass and Brooke’s perspectives which does take a little getting use to. I will tell you to hang in there because the story will bet going. Once it does you will not want to put it down. The twist and turns just keeps coming as the story unfolds. I actually thought I had figured out who the killer was but I was way off. The ending of this book was a big surprise that I did not see coming.

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This was a fun one! Multiple POV’s, a remote isolated setting, and an unrelaiable narrator - the perfect combination for a fun thriller in my opinion.

Thank you Netgalley and RB Media for my review copy!

I love multiple points of view in a thriller and it really worked well in this one.

A remote setting is also a fave. This one had many untrustworthy characters. I didn't know who to trust or what to believe. Murders. Storms. Secrets. Lies.

I questioned everything and there were so many twist!

Full cast audio was fantastic!

Many thanks to NetGalley, Sourcebooks Landmark and RB Media for an ARC and ALC in exchange for my honest review.

oy vey...... i am not going to lie I wanted to love it. It didnt happen. By 50% i got lost confused and bored. I dodnt even finish it.

The Resort is a rereleased thriller by author Sara Ochs, originally published as The Dive.

The titular resort is on the Thai island of Koh Sang and is staffed by a dramatic cast of young ex-pats who all seem to be running from their pasts. One of those staff members, a dive instructor named Cass, is one of our two main narrators. The other is Brooke, a travel influencer on an unnamed revenge mission. A string of resort-related deaths turns everyone into a suspect. Everyone is sketchy. Everyone has an ax to grind.

This story is…okay. I enjoyed the dual-perspective narrative, though it took me a while to remember which details pertain to which characters because everyone’s hiding something and projecting a false exterior. While I was interested in figuring out what the heck is going on on this island, I didn’t find the story to be PROPULSIVE, which made it feel longer than it is. This could be because the characters feel pretty flat, and it seems like every chapter ends with a new, misguided revelation about someone’s guilt. Honestly, it kinda felt like reading a Fear Street Super Chiller, particularly Party Summer. While I have a special place in my heart for those R.L. Stine books, I didn’t think that’s what I’d signed up for here.

The audiobook is a whole other thing. While the readers do a great job of portraying the emotions of their first-person narrators, the accents are BIZARRE. The two main characters are American, but the audiobook narrators are British—doing American accents. Honestly, I didn’t really notice it until two things happened: (1) Brooke announced that she is from Kentucky, though she had worked hard to smooth out her accent to sound like she’s from the west coast. (2) The narrators, especially Brooke, used British pronunciations of words like “been,” “schedule,” and “privacy.” As a Kentuckian myself, I can tell you with 100% certainty that no amount of “smoothing” would cause THAT. It was really distracting! Another weird thing: When the narrators portray other characters speaking, they continue to use their American accents, even though these characters are from all over the world, including England, Scotland, Australia, Sweden, and Romania. This REALLY made it difficult to keep the cast of characters sorted out in my mind, in addition to the two main narrators sounding too similar to one another to distinguish easily. I believe these are not problems with the audiobook narrators’ performances as much as that of the director(s) and producer(s).

Huge ⚠️ trigger warnings ⚠️ for sexual assault, rape, grooming of minors, suicide, child abuse, gaslighting, mental health stigma, and probably some others I’ve missed.

Despite this, I would still be interested in picking up future work by this author and these audiobook narrators.

Review posted on Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/5888769387

Many thanks to NetGalley, Sourcebooks Landmark, and Recorded Books Media for gifting me both a digital and audio ARC of this thriller by Sara Ochs and perfectly narrated by the cast of Miranda Raison, Dakota Blue Richards, Joe Jameson, and Pema Monaghan - 4 stars!

Cass escapes from her troubles to a beautiful, remote island in Thailand. She joins a group of ex-pats, called the Permanents, is a dive instructor, and just got engaged. Life is perfect, right? Well...besides the fact that she finds a dead body on her dive. Soon, everyone's secrets are going to be spilled.

This was a wonderful, atmospheric novel, with a locked-room mystery feel., told from the POV of Cass and Brooke, a beautiful instagram travel influencer, on the island with secrets of her own. I had no clue where this one was going or who could be trusted. And that ending was a shocker! Perfect escape read during the winter. A debut writer that I'm looking forward to reading more from!

I was provided an audio version of this book in exchange for an honest review. In my honest opinion, I urge you to please get the paper or digital version if you plan to read this one.

Story: ★★★★
Narration: ★★

The book itself held a thrilling, if somewhat predictable, story and I flew through it. It would make a great movie, reminiscent of one of my favorites, Turistas, especially with the everything happening at once ending during a raging storm. With the right cast, it could be this summer's must-see.

That said, the audiobook for this one is dreadful. Whoever cast this narration team really messed up, if it's actually people.

Each of the characters on this lone Thai resort island was from a different place: New Zealand, England, Scotland, you name it. However, the majority of the story comes through the character Brooke's POV, read with this bland (and strange) American accent. There was zero attempt to differentiate voices, neither with accents nor timbre, which made the references to accents (that we couldn't hear) laughable.

Perhaps Brooke's character was being read by AI? That would explain the eerily flat tone and weird pronunciations, if the AI were built by someone who was not American but wanted to seem so. Just a few examples of what I'm talking about: Who says turquoise as "ter-kwahz"? Or the brand Nokia as "nocky-uh"? And where in the US do they pronounce anything/everything as "ennuh-thin"/"evruh-thin"? And how, with a straight face, do you make trachea rhyme with "tacky"? It was so distracting to hear this person saying normal words in such unusual ways, like she had never heard them spoken out loud. The narration kept yanking me abruptly out of any enjoyment.

Sara Och's smashing debut, THE RESORT, draws you in from the idyllic tropical front cover to the mysterious paradise setting in this riveting vacation suspense thriller on a remote island in Thailand with two women, murder, and a dangerous cat-and-mouse game.

Cass has lived on Sang, an island in Thailand, desperate to escape her dark past for the past few years. She is a scuba diver instructor. She fell in love with the island and Logan, her fiancé and bar owner.

A woman was found dead weeks earlier, falling from a cliff path. Then, while teaching, she discovers a body: Lucy, one of her students in one of her classes.

A beautiful American influencer, Brooke, arrives in Koh Sang, escaping her past, and takes an interest in the death of Cass's student.

Then Cass begins receiving notes warning her about her secret past. She works with her new friend Brooke to try and unravel the mystery of who killed Lucy and the motive.

Has her past come calling? However, nothing is as it appears when all is unraveled.

THE RESORT is told through the perspective of two unreliable narrators, Cass and Brooke, both hiding dark secrets of the past. With a mysterious island and a locked-room vibe, you know something is lurking, but you are unsure how all the pieces fit together—with many twists and turns.

AUDIOBOOK: I enjoyed the audiobook narrated by Miranda Raison, Dakota Blue Richards, Joe Jameso, and Pema Monaghan, who made the characters come alive in this tropical, chilling, remote, lush setting. Highly recommend the audiobook.

An impressive debut! I enjoyed the backstories and the author's writing. I look forward to reading more!

Thanks to Recorded Books and NetGalley for a gifted, advanced listening review copy.

Blog review posted @
JudithDCollins.com
@JudithDCollins | #JDCMustReadBooks
Pub Date: Feb 13, 2024
My Rating: 4.5 Stars (rounded to 5)
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The Resort is a well paced and atmospheric murder mystery. Everyone on the island has a secret. And when people start dying, Hannah and Cass try to unravel the mystery and work out who they can trust.

I loved the Thailand island setting, and trying to figure out whodunit (I didn’t). The slow burn at the beginning building to multiple twists in the second half worked really well. I’m not normally a fan of the last minute twist, but the I found the epilogue a really satisfying ending.

Initially I found it hard to discern the different characters on the audiobook, but I quickly adjusted. The narrators embodied the characters really well, and captured the tension without over dramatising. The narration was well articulated and paced.

Thank you RB Media and NetGalley for a complimentary copy of this book. Opinions expressed are my own.

📖: The Resort
✍️: Sara Ochs
🎙: Miranda Raison, Dakota Blue Richards, Joe Jameson, Pema Monaghan
⭐️: 4 of 5
🎧: 5 of 5

Troupes & Themes:
- Multiple POV
- Unreliable Narrator

Trigger/Content Warnings:
- Language
- Rape (brief mention, descriptive but not explicit)

My Thoughts:
This was a wild ride with some great twists. Right when I thought I had it figured out, I was wrong. It did drag a bit in places, but overall, this was a good physiological thriller. I would never have guessed this as a debut novel. I also thoroughly enjoyed the narration by all. This was an enjoyable and engaging listen. Thank you, NetGalley, RB Media, and Recorded Books, for the opportunity to listen and review this advanced copy.

Well, I will say this was an interesting read that started off really slow but when you're going to a resort isn't that what you want? A relaxing slow paced visit with no drama right? Nope, not at this resort! The drama is set in Southeast Asia, Thailand to be exact. There's so much going on, but it takes awhile for it all to come together. You read of the characters and you're wondering who can you trust? Who has an ounce of credibility. Well, they all do because you will never see this turn coming. Sure it just comes at you out of nowhere like Wham all in yo face. It was such a change in the story style that I had to make sure I was reading the same book. Well, of course I was the accents from the audiobook made it very clear which person was whom and those accents kind of irritated me a tad. But they fit the characters well. Overall, I give this book a 3.5 because the ending finally came through for me. It could have been a bit shorter in my opinion but if you have time and a good stormy rainy night for a read then you will get something out of this story for sure. Just hang in there. This review was posted to Good Reads as well @Toy Williams ISBN13: 9781728279558

Very good. Keeps you guessing until the very end. Then, with everything wrapping up, there is a major twist that actually makes sense. As out of left field it seemed, it was easily reconciled with the story..
After first needing to adjust to the accent of the narrator, it quickly became a non-issue. I will say she was more of a reader than an actor as there was no discernible difference in voices as she read each person’s narrative.

Wow, what a cast of characters! The Resort is told from the perspective of two women, Cass and Brooke, and the narration for each character was excellent. I loved the setting, a remote island in Thailand. The lawlessness of the environment increased the suspense in this murder mystery, and I could not stop listening. The twist at the end was spectacular, and I would love to see a sequel to this one!

**please note due to low rating I will not be leaving a public review for this book as I have not paid for it.**

Narrated by Miranda Raison, Dakota Blue Richards, Joe Jameson, Pema Monaghan

Novel by Sara Ochs

All the narrators were really good but this story fell painfully flat for me. I'm so sorry for the harsh feedback but I found thr characters and plot to be really dull.

While I didn't enjoy this book, this is my first time trying this author so I would definitely give another of her books a go.

Fancy a vacation resort whodunnit thriller with plenty of flawed characters, secrets and lies, and twists that'll make your head spin? 

Look no further than this fabulous debut novel from Sara Ochs. An initial slow burn, this book really takes off around the midway mark, and I listened to the audiobook over just a few days. The cast of narrators made this a great listening experience. And that ending!

I'll definitely be reading more books from this author in the future.

Thanks to NetGalley and RB Media for an ALC of The Resort. Expected publication date is 13/2/24

Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for the ALC! Unfortunately, this book fell flat for me. I feel like this premise has been done so often for thrillers, particularly in the past year and half. This one wasn’t bad by any means, but the multiple characters and the lack of anything particularly unique to differentiate it from other similar books made it blend into the background for me. I think people who are just getting into reading or haven’t read a thriller with this premise will enjoy it!

⭐️⭐️⭐️💫
I enjoyed the beginning of this book a lot but felt a bit overwhelmed as it progressed. I felt like it started to rush almost with the reveals and "shocking" moments.