The Resort Book Review

I’m going to admit this up front - I didn’t particularly care for a majority of this book. But. The end. Was. Mind blowing! Action packed ending with twist after twist! Now that this admission is out of the way, let’s unpack the book (with minimal spoilers, of course).

Cass is a local dive instructor for the Koh Sang Resort. Koh Sang, a Thai island, is infamous for its parties where people prefer anonymity. Nearly everyone in Koh Sang is running away from something in their past and this makes the island the perfect place to hide and start over. The group of people that have decided to make the island their permanent home is aptly called The Permanents. They, like Cass, have something to hide and we’re only told surface level details about them. This made it very difficult to connect with any of the characters. This was especially true with Cass because everything that was revealed about her up front was so surface level that I didn’t much care what happened to her.

“Koh Sang isn’t that big. But someone here is trying to ruin me.” — Cass

Brooke is a travel influencer with a large Instagram following. However, like most people on Koh Sang, her purpose for being on the island goes beyond the reason she gives when asked. There’s less mystery around Brooke than there is around Cass, but Brooke comes across as vapid and it was also difficult to care about her.

The book goes back and forth between Cass’s point of view and Brooke’s point of view. What we learn from Cass’s point of view is that she’s running from something. What we learn from Brooke’s point of view is that she’s running towards something. When one of Cass’s diving students is found dead, Cass and Brooke team up to figure out why someone would want to kill this particular person. What they find is that this person has ties to the last person that turned up dead on Koh Sang. Then, another person turns up dead. In the end, it turns out that I did guess correctly.

While I was able to correctly guess who killed each of the people who died on the island, there were a few twists I didn’t see coming and a bombshell of an ending that absolutely threw me for a loop. One of the things that I appreciate the most about thrillers is when there’s a twist so good, I’m left with my jaw dropped for several minutes while I process what I just finished reading. This was one of those moments and is honestly the reason why I ended up liking this book so much.

While I do think that this book has room for improvement, I was really impressed with the twists and the ending. I do wish that Cass was more likable, the suspense was more present, and that the action was dispersed more throughout the book. It was a fast paced book that crept up on me in terms of likability. I’m glad that I gave this debut novel a shot.