The Last One by Will Dean

2/5 stars

Everyone strap on your life preservers because you’re in for a long ride.

Caz and her hopefully soon to be fiancé embark on a luxurious cruise to America. However, something is awry as the next morning after they set off, Caz is alone on the ship. Or so she thinks.

This book is long; too long. Parts of it are so wordy and don’t contain any useful information that it’s hard to stay involved in the story. I think at least a third of this could be cut out and the story would be much better (and shorter!).  It took at least a third of the book for anything exciting to even start happening, so don’t expect a rocket from the get go.

I wanted to ooh and ahh at the plot like many reviews I’ve seen, but truthfully….I guessed most of the “big reveals” long before they happened. It was hard for me to get real excited for them when I already figured what they were. I hadn’t anticipated the conclusion, however, but it felt contrived to me. It feels as if the author got tired of writing this and stuck something on at the end for the “intrigue.” I just couldn’t get behind that ending at all. It made everything else in the book seem cheap and was an extremely unsatisfying way to wrap this up.

There were parts of the story that did feel stressful or emotional, but it quickly got lost in the sheer amount of fluff that happened immediately after. This one wasn’t for me, which is unfortunate, but you can’t enjoy them all.

Thank you to Emily Bestler, Atria Books, Simon and Schuster, and NetGalley for the ARC.