This has all the elements I enjoy in my mysteries. The isolated setting is an island with a dilapidated lighthouse. Tess is a disgraced documentary filmmaker taking this last opportunity to redeem herself. Something happened in her past, and the police are calling to ask her about it. So Tess flees to film a team of environmentalists who are tagging the marine mammals who call the island home. There, she meets a cast of likable characters who start acting more and more suspicious as the story progresses. Tess then finds a dead body and the claustrophobic feeling of the island ratchets up. I didn’t like Tess. She is whiny, stubborn and keeps making things worse. But such is the power of a good audiobook narration that Kristin Atherton made me care. Her performance is so rounded that I kept rooting for Tess, despite my not finding her likable. I enjoyed the voices she gave to the rest of the characters. She made them all distinct and changed them subtly as the plot twists revealed their secrets. Is there a killer amongst them? Or is there someone else on the island? Someone that we haven’t seen before? I liked the ending too.
I chose to listen to this audiobook and all opinions in this review are my own and completely unbiased. Thank you, NetGalley/Tantor Audio.

I was very excited to be approved for this audiobook because the story sounded so great and a clever whoddunit and locked-room mystery. However, it was clear that my interest in the story was not going to come from the narrator. I thought her voice was flat and very unemotional. She sounded like she’d rather be doing anything else. As for the story, I didn’t find the characters all that interesting or engaging. I had hard time dispensing one from the other, so none of them seemed really memorable. And weirdly the story seemed like one of those summer beach reads (despite the setting of this particular novel) because the story had a “been there done that” feeling to it as there are numerous mystery books with a similar premise. I was surprised by the ending, but by that time I was ready for the book to be over.