Thoughts on : The Last Houseguest by Megan Miranda
The Last Houseguest by Megan Miranda
Genre : Thriller
Stand alone
About the Book :
Littleport, Maine is like two separate towns: a vacation paradise for wealthy holidaymakers and a simple harbour community for the residents who serve them. Friendships between locals and visitors are unheard of – but that’s just what happened with Avery Greer and Sadie Loman.
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Each summer for a decade the girls are inseparable – until Sadie is found dead. When the police rule the death a suicide, Avery can’t help but feel there are those in the community, including a local detective and Sadie’s brother Parker, who blame her. Someone knows more than they’re saying, and Avery is intent on clearing her name before the facts get twisted against her.
My Thoughts :
All the Missing Girls is one of the most enjoyable thrillers I’ve read in the past few years, and it fact it made it to my top books of 2016. Since then I’ve read two of Megan Miranda’s YA thrillers, The Safest Lies and Fragments of the Lost, but neither really worked for me. The Last Houseguest sounded exactly like my kind of book though, as I never tire of mysteries and seaside small towns! I figured maybe I would enjoy her new adult novel more than the YA ones?
And I did enjoy it a little more than these two, but not to the level of All the Missing Girls. The pace was slow and, while I usually love books that interweave past and present storylines, this one didn’t work for me. I was absolutely not interested by all these chapters from the year before, and I felt they could have been limited to one prologue or chapter in the beginning.
The plot itself was okay, in fact I was quite interested to find out what had and would happen. There’s enough clues and characters and motives to point to a few different suspects along the way, which is always good. However, as the story moved towards its conclusion, I felt the mains twists and revelations were mostly predictable. And I don’t need to have a super unpredictable plot and shocking twists to enjoy a thriller, but here I thought the ones the author picked were not the most interesting.
All of this being said, I really enjoyed the small town feeling and the interactions between the characters. I felt the dynamics between Avery and the visitors were interesting and I wanted more of that, just as I wanted to hear more from the people living in Littleport. I also really liked the dynamics between Avery and Sadie. I would have preferred to see more about their relationship than about the party from the year before.
All in all, despite its flaws, The Last Houseguest was a good summer thriller. And it has one pretty cover; the raindrops are all embossed and the effect is super nice. I just wish I had felt a little more surprised by what was inside.
I’m okay with predictable at times. Sometimes it makes me feel smart in a thriller/mystery.
That’s a good point! 🙂
I like mysteries and seaside small towns too. It sounds like you enjoyed this one overall, even if it was a little predictable Love the cover.
The small town was one of my favorite things about this book, it was well done!
I really liked the beach town too!! I get what you mean about comparing it to ALL THE MISSING GIRLS. That one was just so amazing. The ending of HOUSE GUEST didn’t wow me. I wanted to be totally blindsided, and I kind of wasn’t. But also I read a lot of mysteries, so it probably is harder to shock me than the casual reader.
That’s exactly it. I wanted to be blindsided too, or at least feel like I should have been blindsided if I didn’t read as many thrillers, but the ending felt very expected.
All the Missing Girls will always have a special place in my heart though, I liked it so much.
This is one of those books I sped-read through this summer, not closely enough to consider it a read book/review book, and now I can’t remember much of what I felt about it. That’s the problem with not writing down my thoughts on those fast books! But since it never got me interested enough to read closer, I imagine it wasn’t my favorite either.
I know the feeling! And even after writing this review, I feel like this book didn’t leave such a huge impression.