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The Return of Yet Another Tedious Thriller

Author: Sara Ochs

Koh Sang is Thailand’s famous party island. It’s also the place you go to lose yourself – literally. The few “permanents” on the island are all running from something, recreating themselves and hiding their pasts. When the tourists start showing up dead though, an Instagram influencer known for her bikini pictures takes the darker side of the island viral.

I really need to stop reading thrillers. I, along with everyone else, fell in love with Gone Girl and spent years chasing the experience, reading every thriller I could find. A good 95% of those fillers were middle-tier recycling at best, a good 4% utter trash, and the remaining 1% that longed for holy grail experience of twisting turns, shocking revelations, and who-dunnits galore. The Resort lands squarely in the trash category.

We’re in Thailand, but it might as well be anywhere USA. There is no Thai culture. Only one Thai character, Sengphet, who is briefly introduced as a waiter and then carted off by corrupt police. Supposedly, there is some big bad tropical storm (we don’t see), and I guess some pretty water with fish. Maybe. Bad thriller trope #1 “exotic” under described location – exotic mostly because they serve fancy drinks and everyone is a tanned tourist. Sigh.

Bad thriller trope #2 – alternating viewpoints. We get two main characters – one of the Permanents, Cass, who is a dive instructor celebrating her engagement to another Permanent and running from her past (which is mostly fraught with *shock, awe* flickering glimpses of bloody knives.) Cass has been a little stressed lately, because of that past of hers (cue flashback – blood, scream, knife) and has been self-medicating with Xanax, which apparently enables you to completely forget everything. So convenient.

As Cass sits on the sidelines and fusses with her little flashbacks and wonders where her ever moving pill bottle has gone, our other airhead, Brooke, narrates. It takes a good half of the book to separate the two characters because their writing style and cadence is exactly the same. Brooke is a self-made mega Instagram influencer who is so successful with so many followers and yet, so broke. She makes disparaging remarks about having to post all these bikini pics, but she’s gotta do what she’s gotta do for the ‘Gram.

Of course, Brooke isn’t just any tourist. She too has a (*cue* thunder, lightning, mascara streaking trauma) PAST. She remembers her past, but she’s going to take her sweet time telling you about it and why she is on the island. And by that, I mean hundreds of pages.

Image by Pop Catalin from Pixabay

When the first body is discovered by Cass, the dumb duo team up. The police are being thwarted by the Jaws-style resort owner, who just wants to make money and not scare off tourists, but these two girls are going to prowl the interwebs until they find the killer, because foul play is so obvious.

Fast forward a couple of hundred pages and we’re still in the same place. The girls are skulking around the island, everybody is telling trite lies, there’s some rain, and social media reveals answers. Because if you just search someone’s Facebook enough, they are BOUND to admit to murder. Right?

There is a lot of dead time, many repetitive, bleary flashbacks, and acting skills that make Tommy Wasio’s The Room look good. All of this, with lots of accusations and very poorly planned sleuthing and dramatic assumptions (I saw YOU with the peach blossom bellini drink, so it must have been you with the rope . . . in on the beach . . . with Colonel Mustard). It’s the biggest nothing ever.

But then, 400 absolutely painful pages in, we have to do a twist, and then a twist, and then another twist. Now, since we’ve done no investigating and revealed nothing, we have to start just making wild connections. First, because someone has anxiety and took a Xanax, they have so totally, obviously gone on a black-out induced killing spree, because that is TOTALLY one of the side effects. Next, we need to do a 180, have a convenient memory, and then have a completely unrelated rape / revenge story thrown in. Also, this revenge narrative needs to NOT be targeted at the rapist, but at someone completely tangential. Then, we need to randomly add a brand-new character, throw in ANOTHER twist, do a showdown, have some wild assumptions taken as fact, have a dramatic self-sacrifice, end on a happily ever after, and then throw ANOTHER UNEARNED TWIST IN THE END.

Is this a comedy, or better yet a parody? Is this story in earnest? Were we expected to take this at face value, as an actual attempt at a novel? There is no character development, no realism, no pacing, and no shred of common sense. It almost feels like we are watching a bunch of hyper-caffeinated 9-year-olds make up a plot, going “AND THEN” and trying to one up each other. Except that would probably be better.

This is it. I’m done. No more thrillers for me for a while.

– Frances Carden

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Frances Carden
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