The Other Guest - Heidi Perks

Reading Challenge Category: Free ARC from NetGalley

Official Blurb:

She thinks she knows the truth. But what if she's wrong?
Laila and her husband arrive for a week's holiday in Greece in desperate need of a reset.
As Laila sits by the pool she finds herself inexplicably drawn to the other family staying in their resort.
Em has no idea who Laila is, or that she has been watching her and her teenage sons and husband so intently.
Five days later their worlds will be blown apart by a horrifying event.
Laila thinks she knows the truth of what happened. But in telling Em what she's seen, she stands to lose everything she holds dear.
And what if she's got it wrong?

My Thoughts:

So this had me gripped right from the beginning. There are little hooks at the end of each chapter to keep you wanting to turn the page, and I loved the build-up to the death.
However, despite how amazing the book was, it fell completely flat at the end. It went from a five-star read right down to three very fast (and it is only because I enjoyed 98% of the book that it didn’t go down to two!). It was just so disappointing and really not worth reading for that ending. I’m sorry to be so brutal, but that was one of the worst endings I’ve read in a long time.
This is the first book I have read by this author, so I’m not sure if this is normal for her to have such a disappointing ending to what could have otherwise been a stellar read. It hasn’t made me want to try any of her others!
My problem as well is that once I’m left disappointed with a book like this, I start to go back over it in my mind and pick holes with things that hadn’t really annoyed me whilst reading, like Laila’s husband’s actions. Thinking back on them, his taking Laila to that island for a holiday was just a recipe for disaster.
The reactions of most of the guests to the death at the hotel were a bit lacklustre, and even the bereaved weren’t as distraught as I was expecting. They were still functioning and coherent, making the death seem less real and monumental.
I’ll stop there before I end up really hating how I have spent my last four evenings reading this. The ending could have been twisty and turny, but it wasn’t. It was boring and dull. There was no excitement to the big reveal; it was just “oh, is that all it was after all that?!” I walked away from this book feeling let down by the author by how uninspired it was.