When The Last One, by Will Dean, opens, Caroline/Caz and her boyfriend Pete are setting off on a romantic cruise vacation. I love the whole idea of a transatlantic cruise, and the luxe Atlantica seemed like the perfect setting for a locked-room suspense thriller. When Caz wakes up on the first morning, though, Pete is gone, and so are all the other passengers. There’s no way off the ship since, you know, it’s in the middle of the ocean. I always love thrillers where our protagonists get cut off from society, don’t you? And the sea voyage got us there without a lot of complicated explanation.

As Caz explores the deserted ship, she finds 3 other survivors of… whatever took all the passengers off. The survival parts of The Last One were fascinating, because they were on a luxury ship, trying to scavenge enough food, drinking water and light sources. My favorite part was about Caz and the three other survivors scavenging lux supplies to survive, I would have read a whole book set here.  There are intriguing hints of dark backstories, and also maybe a disturbing chance that Pete set Caz up for whatever this is?

Suddenly, the ship mystery suddenly becomes a reality show. With challenges, a show host, and a prize pot for the winner? Or possibly a darkweb murder show? I often like reality shows in fiction, there can be so much tension in the absurdity of the whole idea real-for-an-audience, but this was really pushing the thriller believability. Especially when it was a normal reality show with challenges and prize money, and a chance to leave. I understood why Smith wanted to stay — greed was his main motivation at all times. He had dollar signs where a personality might go. But Caroline? All of her internal thoughts were about the cafe, her sister, her family, and wondering if everyone would be OK without her. Even in the beginning when she was on a romantic vacation, she was worried about her family and her staff back home, so it didn’t really follow that she’d choose to stay on board once it was a reality show, let along a weirdly dangerous reality show.

As I was reading, I kept turning the pages to see what would come next, because this book is all about the intriguing and twisted setting. It’s not the characters, at all, Caz was hungry and cold in the present, and upset about her father’s gambling in the past. That’s about it. But the isolated ship, especially with the ominous do not open box, the hints of haunting and ghost ships, the dangers of surviving, was such a perfect thriller setting. So many intriguing possibilities! Just about the only pages in this novel without extreme tension were about Caz doing the challenges for the reality show. Since there was no possibility that the protag could get hurt or killed, I kinda skimmed those sections looking for more clues about the ship mystery.

This was a tense thriller until the end. By the time Caz is told that almost everyone around her was an actor, the horrors weren’t really a darkweb murder show, everything was staged, she was perfectly safe the whole time, no one who died off-camera was really dead, etc., etc., it felt cheap. I’d already skimmed Caz doing the physical challenges, and some of that was that it didn’t occur to me that any harm could actually come to our protagonist. So, discovering at the end that that whole thing was staged and fake, and, yes, she couldn’t really come to any harm was annoying. Why did I slog through TWO boring physical challenge fakeouts, then? This ending felt cheap. Plus, none of the more interesting storylines (The car crash? Caz’s daughter? Smith?) were ever resolved, so I felt a bit cheated. 

And then the last-minute twist. Just ugh. I often enjoy mysteries and thrillers with a dramatic final page that points to more secrets, but this felt extremely forced. Even though I enjoyed reading most of this book, it left me with an eyeroll instead of suspense.