Isolation Island - Louise Minchin
I received a review copy of this novel via NetGalley.
Publisher – Headline
Published – September 12th, 2024
Price – £20.00 hardback | £9.99 Kindle
This is the fourth book I've read in the past 12 months based around the premise of a reality show gone wrong (the others being The Holy Terrors by Simon R. Green, The Escape Room by L.D. Smithson, and The Traitors by C.A. Lynch). It's a pitch that I'm really drawn to but thus far I can't say I've found an execution of it that I actually enjoyed. Isolation Island is my latest attempt to scratch this particular itch. Here's the blurb:
IT'S A PRIZE ANYONE WOULD KILL TO WIN...
Ten celebrities have arrived to take part in the most gruelling - and lucrative - reality survival show ever devised: two weeks completely alone on a remote Scottish island, in the depths of winter.
With a production team that seems incapable of keeping them safe, a gathering storm and the unrelenting gaze of hidden cameras, the contestants are stretched to the limit as they try and outshine their fellow competitors and hide their darkest secrets.
But when a contestant winds up dead, it soon becomes clear that the players are not just fighting for the prize, but for their lives.
Reviews for this book quite frequently compare it to Agatha Christie's And Then There Were None, which was one of my favourite books I read last year, and the blurb promises a thriller in which a killer is on the loose and the isolated characters have to fight for their lives. That's not really what I got.
The murder in this murder mystery doesn't occur until nearly two thirds of the way through the book, and I spent much of the time leading up to it waiting for it to happen. Had this time been spent getting to know the characters, giving them all motives for the murder yet to come, and really rooting us in the world then I would have been fine with it, but weirdly it's not until after the killing takes place and Lauren (our investigative reporter main character) starts to dig into things that we really begin to get a sense of who these people are. Because of the comparisons to And Then There Were None I was also expecting that once the killing started nobody would be safe, but it seems that the people making that comparison either didn't read this book or haven't read Christie.
Murder mysteries - and especially those trying to work in the same space as Agatha Christie, the best to ever do it - require that the writer has a very firm grip of events. Christie's characterisation is often lacking but you always know that the plot is locked down as tight as it's possible to be. Every detail matters, and if you pay enough attention you can maybe hope to piece things together. That's unfortunately not the case here. At times Minchin seems to lose track of the situation she's set up. On the night of the first proper eviction from the reality show, for example, the contestants are instructed to pack their belongings and they line up with "their bags in their hands". The problem, of course, is that we saw a member of the production crew burn everyone's clothes and belongings on the beach before they arrived at the monastery, so nobody has a bag or any possessions to pack into it. The only things they own are the robes they're wearing and wooden toothbrushes that have been given to them, and I don't know why anybody would bother to pack them up to take them home.
This lack of attention to detail also extends to our sense of the timeline of events, and how little sense we get of time passing in any meaningful way. At one point Lauren worries about how she might be blamed for the death and how she has no alibi for the time it took place, telling herself that "she had been on her own most of the day, walking along the cliff path, replaying the events of the night before". But when we see this take place a few chapters earlier it's in a sequence that lasts for barely a paragraph and gives the impression that her walk lasts for a few minutes before she heads back due to poor weather, and as we move towards the climax Lauren tells us "she was walking for around an hour". This sort of thing happens regularly, where we jump from morning to evening with no real connective tissue, so that we start to lose track of how much time has actually been spent on the island and how far removed events are from one another or how long things take. And though this seems like a small quibble, it's on these sorts of details that murder mysteries live and die. The reader needs to be able to feel like they have all the clues needed to solve the mystery to hand, and that's impossible when the facts of the case keep changing in ways that feel like mistakes rather than intentional revelations.
I'm being fairly critical here but with all of that said, I still found myself gripped and wanting to keep reading. Once the murder actually happens and the plot starts to move the book is much more impressive, and the reveal at the ending is seeded in a way that allows you to predict it a page or too earlier and feel smart about solving the mystery, despite the lack of any meaningful clues in the rest of the narrative. The writing isn't flashy or particularly impressive - it's downright clunky in places - but it's got that page-turning thriller quality to it that kept me up past midnight wanting to know what was going to happen next and where this was all going, and the ending was satisfying enough that I came away feeling that I'd enjoyed it despite being critical in the first half. This is the sort of book I'd pick up in an airport and read on the plane at the beginning of a holiday and would think that I'd got my money's worth before leaving it at the hotel book swap. Of the handful of "reality TV gone wrong" murder mysteries I've read this year this was by far the best.