The Last Resort

By: Susi Holliday

Narrated by: Imogen Church

Length: 10 hrs and 38 mins

Publisher's Summary

Seven strangers. Seven secrets. One perfect crime.

When Amelia is invited to an all-expenses-paid retreat on a private island, the mysterious offer is too good to refuse. Along with six other strangers, she’s told they’re here to test a brand-new product for Timeo Technologies. But the guests’ excitement soon turns to terror when the real reason for their summons becomes clear. 

Each guest has a guilty secret. And when they’re all forced to wear a memory-tracking device that reveals their dark and shameful deeds to their fellow guests, there’s no hiding from the past. This is no luxury retreat - it’s a trap they can’t get out of. 

As the clock counts down to the lavish end-of-day party they’ve been promised, injuries and in-fighting split the group. But with no escape from the island - or the other guests’ most shocking secrets - Amelia begins to suspect that her only hope for survival is to be the last one standing. Can she confront her own dark past to uncover the truth - before it’s too late to get out?

©2020 by Susi Holliday. (P)2020 Brilliance Publishing, Inc., all rights reserved.

Well done Updated version of a story

No spoilers! Hate them! The idea of a group of people going away and something has been done . This author has done a great job reimagining it in today's high tech world. Not too high tech to bog you down in terms just action , which makes it appealing to an older crowd as well as younger. No Gore but always something going on. I am hard to please and couldn't stop listening. I figured it out but still had interesting twist. The narrator ; Ms.Church, perfection as usual. I am hoping her next book, which I am going to get as soon as I finish writing this is as good as this one is. Well done , Susi Holliday and thank you for a great hard to come by listen🤗

Entertaining But Disappointing

I had very high hopes for this novel. I absolutely loved “Violet,” which Susi Holliday wrote as SJI Holliday. The premise of this book sounded great, and my being an Imogen fan...I was primed for audible bliss. This book is not as exquisite as “Violet.” If you are looking for a really unique psychological thriller, narrated by the devine Imogen Church, don’t miss “Violet.” As for “The Last Resort,” I was fully engaged throughout the bulk of the novel. The characters were fully developed and their situation was interesting enough; but much of it really was ‘characters looking for a plot.’ The climax and ending require complete suspension of disbelief...even within the realm of this fictional world.

delusional

this book had me intrigued because I wanted to know why they were on the island and how the main character and her incident factored into the story, but I was disappointed after the who and why is revealed. the person a who planned all of this didn't have ANY good enough reason to do so, or to have this imagined connection with Amelia. (spoiler ahead) they met once during childhood, she was literally Amelia's childhood vacation friend, you know that person you meet while on vacation with family as a kid? yeah, well imagine them coming to find you 20 years later to kill you because you never called her again. so ridiculous that ist is hard for me to believe even a crazy person would be able to convince themselves that Amelia owed them some sort of relationship.

Lots of nothing

10 minutes in and I have bothing interesting, compelling or to keep me investing or listening. Mostly wasted words and annoying characters.

not for me, chile

my immediate thoughts upon completing this tale: *SPOILERS AHEAD* - - -

1. the motivation behind this entire operation was unconvincing. i understand the villain’s obsession, but the way they went about acting on that obsession didn’t make sense to me.

2. in fact, all of the characters were unconvincing.

3. i love fiction about incredible technological inventions. i’m good at suspending disbelief and i like the creative concepts authors drum up. the technology here was actually quite intriguing.

but i didn’t believe the mind behind the inventions in this book at all. i can’t really articulate why, but it has something to do with the fact that the one person who is connected to the main xter just happens to grow up and be the world’s greatest inventor...and again, said inventor’s motivations behind creating such absurdly incredible technology.. it just didn’t convince me.

4. why didn’t the tech work on main character again?? i understand why as a plot device, but i didn’t catch why the ear device wouldn’t work on her.

5. the main character is a white savior. it’s 2020, let’s stop that please.

6. i love imogen church but sometimes she does the most. and her american accent makes me wants to impale my ear with an icicle.

7. free my girl tiggy from any & all judgment, she did nothing wrong. lol.

Not that bad

Just finished The Last Resort. Interesting. Unexpected ending. Pretty good read that you might want to look into if you’re ever bored and stuck in doors on a rainy day.

Not what I expected

This is one of my favorite narrators, but the story line is pretty weak and not engaging.

lame

Absolutely boring. Beginning, middle, and end were of the same caliber of dullness. You could have at least played up the end. The characters were brainless and boorish (much like the real world). This was uninteresting and not even worthy of background noise.

Who's next and why?

Ready for another "if it's too good to be true..." stories? This group will be deciding that in quick fashion as the fun begins. The gore is a bit deep at times but it makes for a good story. Whatever assumptions you make, will be wrong. Narrator had many voices to utilize and accents to aid in keeping the characters easy to follow.

Can't do it

This is the worst book. I can't stand the narrator and her awful voice changes. I'm about 10 chapters in and I'm giving up.

Narration spoils a good book

It's a good book, but I had to give up listening because of the narration. I avoid Imogen Church and could never pin point why, but I worked out that it's because I can't stand her sucking the air through her teeth. It seems she does it every time she reaches a comma in a sentence. She seems to 'chew' on words and hissing air and over exaggerates every word. I've started to avoid books narrated by her but I've been looking forward to this book - its a shame because she has a very nice voice, she does accents very well, she reads the story well and is very expressive, but these teeth sucking and exaggeration and the way she reads male voices make it impossible to listen to. Once you pick up on it, you can't stop hearing it. Its also a shame because she gets to read the books I like to listen to - these things are just habits and hopefully she will stop. I've returned 2 audiobooks and bought the hard copies instead because of this issue.

Sorry if it sounds unkind but if these habits put people off it's a shame that people will miss out on a really good book.

The story is good, it has good pacing and the characters are interesting but I cringed every time I heard her reading a male voice, especially the American male.

Warning: don't start the book unless you have time

...to finish it! Very hard to stop listening - its a great thriller! Narration is excellent.

WOW what a story

This is one hell of a story, weird and bizarre and yes, oh my goodness, as beyond belief as they get, I just love these ones, the deviousness of authors knows no bounds and not all devious minds write, they are the ones about which the authors DO write, and I enjoy them so very much, this is no exception.

Absolutely brilliant, totally entertaining all the way through, and Imogen Church is brilliant as the narrator, she was a perfect choice for this book.

Brilliant!

What a story! Loved it! Very modern, clever, mysterious, keeping you thinking of it all plus your own life! Brilliantly written, also can not forget to mention my favourite narrator Imogen Church. All the characters with specific intonation, accents...... 5 🌟!

Phenomenally Bad

Good lord, what an absolute waste of ten hours and thirty eight minutes of my life. This wasn't so much a story as just a handful of concepts thrown together with zero attempt to make them work in unison, or provide absolutely explanation or closure for the mysteries that the book beats you over the head with until deciding nah, almost none of what you've heard so far is relevant. This can work well, but not when the entire book promises you a whodunnit mystery, with explanations behind all the seemingly impossible things we're teased with throughout. It'd be like having a locked room mystery where ten hours of it is spent posing the mystery of how the killer escaped a locked room, and the remaining 38 minutes going 'they just did, okay?'.

You'd be mistaken for thinking this is a parody of the closed-circle mystery genre, until you realize there's no punchline, it's just meaningless drivel that asks us to suspend our disbelief so ludicrously while also ensuring that the ONLY way the book could be satisfying is if it provided coherent answers. It doesn't. The main villain well be one of the most farcical, pointless and unengaging antagonists in professionally published literature. Their brief time in the story and reveal of their motive almost caused me to rage-quit the book with only thirty minutes left, just so as to salvage at least SOME of my life I was duped into wasting on this thing. It's just so thoughtless and insulting to the reader.

The narration is... hot damn, I don't even know how to explain it. I've been a fan of a lot of Imogen Church's narrations. She's a genuinely fantastic character actor, and she still is here when performing spoken dialogue. But goddamn what on EARTH was with 3rd person narration, ie the majority of the book?! It felt like I was listening to someone reading a children's textbook, to children. Church's rhythm, cadence and inflection followed an almost totally rigid pattern regardless of how wildly unsuitable it was for the words she was reading, making it sound like a high quality yet obviously unnatural synthesized voice performance. It had this bizarre uncanny valley feel to it that made the entire book feel like a prologue or a painful explanation of the plot to a massively hyperactive child. Maybe Church read the novel and exhaustion at having to perform this nonsense took over and she didn't have the energy to even attempt to match the text and tone, knowing how meaningless and pointless the plot ends up.

It's extremely frustrating, because I kept listening despite the absolutely wildly inappropriate narration, because the author did do a good job of setting up the mysteries and making me want to know where it was all going and how things were transpiring the way they were. But when the answer ends up being 'it's not going anywhere, and this stuff just happened okay, because I said so' when the entire draw of the book thus far has been the promise of, well, the opposite of that, then it just leads to The Last Resort being one of the most obnoxiously bad mystery novels I've read in possibly ever.

Absolutely astonishing that the myriad plot holes, continuity errors, loose ends and incoherent character writing ever passed an editor's approval.

wtaf

🤔🤔 what the actual ****
it was terrible
so confusing and rubbish
so much potential

Engaging narration but the story is poor

The book starts well. It is immediately intriguing and pulls the listener in to the mystery. Very quickly you become aware that the novel is a kind of high tech adaptation of Agatha Christie’s ‘And Then There Were None’, which is not a bad thing. However, once the characters are moving around the island, it all starts to get rather tedious and the tension established at the start dissipates. The end of the book is very disappointing - its whole premise is revealed to be completely absurd. Not only that, but you cannot ignore the mile-wide plot holes that ultimately make the book deeply unsatisfying. The narrator does a pretty good job of bringing the unlikeable characters to life, giving them distinctive personalities and qualities. However, the best narrator in the world would not be able to rescue this book which, in the end, is just a bit of a mess. The book is also very long.

Meh.

Finished mostly out of curiosity to see whether there would be a twist at the end. No, not really. Just a hideously two dimensional psychopath responsible for it all. Wouldn't recommend.

Captivating

The whole book kept me utterly captivated by the mystery and wanting to figure out what the characters had to do with each other... Which is why the ending was very weak compared to the rest of the book. I had hoped for something more conspiratorial around all the characters, not just Amelia. But the first 90% of the book was wonderful.

Amazingly brilliant job by voice actor Imogen Church!

Utterly Ridiculous

What did I like about this.... absolutely nothing. Struggled to the end even though I found the whole book painful listening. An absolutely stupid storyline which was utterly unbelievable and frankly ridiculous. Did not enjoy and would not read anything else by this author.