Last to Leave the Room

I'm glad I didn't look back at the blurb of this when I started it because wow, it gives so much away. But honestly, the cover gives a lot away, too. I don't think this book is concerned with giving you twists, so perhaps it's better described as suspense than thriller. Certainly psychological horror. And a character study of Tamsin Rivers.

Tamsin is an ambitious, cutthroat scientist running experiments deep in the ground, and those experiments correlate to a "subsidence" happening around the city. Then a door appears in her basement that wasn't there before... And personally I think that's all you should know going into it!

I read this via audiobook, and the beginning chapters are a bit dense, so I struggled. But I kept going and the story starts to zero in on Tamsin and her basement, which was perfect. The audiobook narrator was great. I never really noticed her voice, which is a good thing. I often get annoyed by a narrator's style or voice acting choices, but not here.

I enjoyed Tamsin as the narrator, and I enjoyed her voice. Her personality shift over the course of the book is so well done. It's weird to get to the end and think back to where she started. It's incremental enough to work. The slow escalation of the situation was handled well, too, and helped me stay invested. I'd tried Starling's The Luminous Dead in the past, but DNFed it because it felt far too repetitive in the middle. I think I could have loved that one as a novella. This one felt like it warranted a novel, though I still think it was too long. She dwells too much on the science and explanation of what's going on when it doesn't really matter.

The way everything plays out with Lachlan was unexpected but fascinating. I could've used more of their relationship in the book. There are interesting power dynamics and desires at play.

There's one assumption that Tamsin makes at the end that causes her to make a certain choice... and I didn't like it. It didn't make sense to me. I think you could get Tamsin to the same place without having her make such a weird mental leap.

Stories of mentally spiraling downward are my kind of thing, so this worked for me. I'd compare the tone of this to the movies Resurrection and The Novice. I'm struggling to think of a book to compare it to because most thrillers I read are more twisty, and this just isn't. I am reminded of The Anomaly by Le Tellier, but this has more horror and action. I also think of Fever Dream by Samanta Schweblin because of the mental disorientation the narrator experiences.

I'm very happy to have had a good time with this one!

Thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for the ARC.