This isolation thriller follows 4 friends - Riley, Sam, Mia, and Scarlett - all recently graduated from art school. They decide to take the summer and vacation together to relax, make art, and figure out what to do with the rest of their lives. Whisper Island - a private island off the Alaskan coast - seems like the perfect getaway. Until people start dying. Between the four girls, Sam's brother, and his girlfriend - that makes six people on the island ... that they know of. Each person has secrets and there's a chance that any of those secrets could have followed them to the island. Or maybe, the killer is closer than they might think.
TW/CW: drug abuse, hazing
The real star of this book for me was the isolation sub-genre and how well Lynch implemented it. I love a good isolation thriller because of the instant tension, suspicion, and questions it poses. Whisper Island is the last island in a archipelago, about 10 miles off the coast of Alaska. The characters are told the whole island is owned by one family but it has been abandoned and used as a vacation rental for years. The girls are brought over to the island by a hired boat but since they plan on staying for 3 months, they plan on using the boat provided to them on the island for trips back to town. Because of this set up, all it takes is for a few things to go wrong and the group is completely cut off in a very believable way. From that point, the tension really ramps up and Lynch does a great job at showing us the characters problem solving, only to be thwarted by the killer. They are basically stuck on the island with only what they initially brought with them and the characters are doing their best to not only survive, but to figure out who is killing them off and why.
The characters, I'll admit, took me a while to warm up to. When I initially read the synopsis on NetGalley, I thought the friendship dynamic was going to be much different. I think in most of these "a group of friends goes on vacation" type of isolation thrillers, the friend group is usually a little older and maybe has fallen out of touch a bit (for example, The Hunting Party by Lucy Foley) and thus part of the point of the trip is to reconnect and possibly reconcile. In this case, some of the girls had been friends for a while, but some were newer to the group so the dynamic was a little weird for me. I didn't feel like these people were close enough to vacation on an island together for 3 months. The story does give us a bit of background and shows us how the 4 friends all came to meet in college, but it wasn't enough of a set up for me to believe the initial premise of the book. As we got to see the group work together to survive their situation, I then got to see more of how the friendship group dynamic worked and I became more invested in the characters. I still didn't entirely believe they liked each other enough to go on vacation together, but I could at least understand how the group dynamics would have them ending up on the island. I wish we had gotten either more set up in the beginning or more flashbacks during the plot for further character/group dynamic exploration and explanation. I don't really feel like there was much character development going on but maybe if I had seen more of the 'before' versions of the characters then I could see how the events on the island were changing them.
I really loved the POV choices in this book. Initially, we only get the POV of the original 4 friends, but once we're on the island we get Sam's brother and his girlfriend's POVs as well. I recently read One by One by Ruth Ware and we only got 2 POVs in that book and I made a point in my review that the POV choice by Ware made me discount any of the other characters as viable suspects and that if we had more POVs in that book, the identity of the killer would have been more of a surprise for me. In Whisper Island, we do get the POV of all the characters and it does make for a much more compelling read. All of the characters have their own secrets that may or may not be connected to the events happening on the island. It was a little frustrating in the beginning to have a lot of the chapters have some veiled reference to that secret where a character would say something like "good thing we're having this vacation, I needed to get away from home for my own safety". This, obviously, helped the mysterious aspect of the book because we didn't know which character's secret was the key to figuring out the truth but it was a little too heavy-handed for my personal liking.
This was pretty much a straight up thriller. There was a mystery aspect, but none of the characters really seemed concerned with figuring out the who or why - they just wanted to survive long enough to get off the island. Once the characters got to the island and the bodies started dropping, I had a really fun time reading this. However, it took a bit too long to get there for my liking. They got to the island at about the 20% mark and first body drop was closer to the halfway point. I really like my isolation thrillers to get to the isolation part faster and for those bodies to start dropping pretty quickly (but that is just a personal preference). In most isolation thrillers I've read, there's always a moment when they start to suspect that the killer is one of the people inside the group and a lot of the tension and suspense in those stories comes from that angle. In this case, any time a suspicion was presented that one of the characters might be responsible, it was almost immediately dismissed. But the dismissals, I felt, were very surface level and along the lines of "I would never do that, we're all friends here" and I thought these would be perfect times for the friendship group to show the cracks under the surface but nothing ever came out like that. I needed more drama from these early-20-somethings! I will admit the reveal of who the killer is really got me good. However, the way the ending played out was extremely unsatisfying for me. After some reflection time, I think my main issue with the ending stems from the fact that we didn't get a really good view of this group before the events on the island so, as I said above, I couldn't get a good view of how the characters changed. I didn't have any plot-level issues with the ending and, in a lot of ways, I think it made a lot of sense. I think the ending would have been much more impactful from a character-level perspective if we had gotten to know the characters better and got to see just how much impact the events on the island had on their lives going forward.
Overall, this was a fun read, but there were a number of issues I had that, overall, impacted my enjoyment of the book. I think the isolation elements and POV choices were excellent. However, the character development and group dynamic was really lacking for me and I think if that was dialed in a little better, this could have been a really fantastic read.
Thanks to NetGalley and One More Chapter for the ARC in exchange for review
The Kindle edition was published February 2, 2021 but paperback edition has an expected publication date of November 16, 2021.
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