That first book was a claustrophobic tale of a teenage girl being held prisoner in a New Zealand coastal town. Pomare’s mastery of story construction and smoothly readable prose has been solid since his Ngaio Marsh Award winning 2018 debut Call Me Evie, and the standard has remained admirably high ever since.
As the mystery of who planted the cameras – and why – ticks down to an ambivalent conclusion, like a precision tooled Swiss watch attached to a pipe bomb, it’s wise to remember that not only is seeing not believing, but thinking you fully understand what you’ve seen is unwise. It all ends with a corpse both Lina and Cain know rather better than they’re willing to admit. Starting with a brutal home invasion that has been live-streamed to a paying audience of online voyeurs whose banal yet malign live-chat is woven throughout. What could possibly go wrong?Īround the mid-point of the book, rather a lot. The path out of at least some of their problems is to rent out an isolated lake house Lina has inherited for weekends, while they prepare it for sale. Both have secrets that come to light when they’re not as good at scrubbing their internet histories as they think. She’s a paramedic whose own career is about to blow up after a call goes tragically bad. He’s an ex-SAS soldier whose failed business isn’t helping a rocky return to civilian life that includes increasingly pointed questions about his role in civilian deaths in Afghanistan. JP Pomare’s fourth novel, The Last Guests, gets away with murder.Ĭain and Lina Phillips narrate most of the novel. It takes a cold eye, steady hand and a healthy dose of bare-faced cheek for any crime writer to open a thriller with an epigram from Hitchcock’s peeping Tom classic Rear Window. In praise of our best crime writer and his new creepy home-invasion novel ReadingRoom Book of the Week: The terrifying Mr Pomare
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