“The chickens were released from their cages but remain on the property.”

124. The Last – Hanna Jameson

There’s a murdered girl in a water tank, but in all honesty she’s not really important. She mainly confused me because she’s like a reference to Dark Water and the actual younger woman found in the Cecil Hotel’s rooftop water tank, Elisa Lam. It should be noted that the hotel in The Last is a remote one in Switzerland. There’s a body buried outside, he, also, is not really important. There’s a reference to a serial killer having stayed there which is tied into the real story of Rodney Alcala, that guy who won The Dating Game on TV and thankfully didn’t end up going on the date because the lady was creeped out by him; and rightly so, he was an actual serial killer. Not only are these ties to real stories relatively meaningless, the blurb for the book also mentioned And Then There Were None and The Shining, neither of which are truly good comparisons for this book. It isn’t a murder mystery of people being offed one by one, not really, especially as most of the deaths are suicides; and it’s set in an isolated hotel like The Shining, but there’s no real madness and no well defined family-murdering and the bartender seems like a nice guy.

This is more like a spinoff of The Walking Dead with no zombies, just a world post-nuclear bombings that really turned elsewhere into a nightmare, but not this isolated hotel. Oh, and they never actually run out of supplies. There’s a group of left behind guests and they have to sort out working together. The philandering academic is keen to document things as they are now and reminiscing about how he screwed up in the US, slowly. Also, he has a tooth problem – nightmarish in the post-apocalypse when the dentists at the hotel have died. The philandering academic is also part of finding the girl in the water tank and tries to sort out how she died with the amount of energy that can be expended with interviews done by someone who does research and not live investigation, not finding some DVDs, and pawing through some rooms. He does find a suspicious post-it. Oh, and he tries meth at one point.

It is readable, but there are some major issues at the end in addition to the things I found confusing or like odd additions I’ve mentioned. In a way, the ending is like they finally found a story that would be cooler to read than this one, so, if a series was being set up this book would make more sense structurally. But I don’t get that impression.

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Twiglet and Pammy are looking for the thrilling white knuckle madness promised and I hate to disappoint them.