As a long-standing Simon Lelic fan a new book from him is always an event and The Search Party certainly doesn't disappoint..
16 year-old Sadie Saunders has disappeared, her rucksack full of personal effects and bloodied coat are found so the inhabitants of the small coastal town where she lives and the police searching for her don't expect to find her alive. Five of her best friends think the police are searching in the wrong spot so head into the woods to conduct their own search. D.I. Rob Fleet is leading the search and suspects that the friends are hiding something, not least Sophie's boyfriend Mason. Fleet lived in the town as a boy and it holds many memories for him that re-surface on his return.
The book starts of quite slowly as each of the 5 friends gives their version of events during interviews with Fleet, as the book progresses their stories often change and with it the perceptions of the reader,and of course Fleet. This seems a little odd at first but as the story progresses it turns out to be an effective literary device. As the search by the 5 friends continues strange things start to happen,nerves fray and it comes to an explosive end and another case for the embattled Fleet to solve.
While Fleet tries to solve the mystery of Sophie's disappearance he also has to deal with a superior officer seemingly more interested in a quick result than the truth, and his past in the town catching up with him.
As always with a Simon Lelic book this is an involving read full of believable characters and with a clever plot. The 5 friends are all pretty awful characters that probably deserve each other and there's enough in Fleet's backstory and situation at the end of the book to suggest a series should Mr Lelic choose to do so.
This one will have the reader guessing all the way through,most of the information comes through 5 people who constantly change their story to suit themselves,the unreliable narrator is a stock thriller theme,this book has 5 of them..
I read the book from start to finish in about 6 hours, another winner from Simon Lelic

Thanks to Simon Lelic, Penguin Books UK and Netgalley for the ARC in return for an honest review.

This was a great read. I found it quite slow and hard to get into at the start, but by the middle I was hooked.

It's well written. It flashes from focusing on the detective to each teenager being interviewed after the incident. This was a bit distracting at first, but once I was used to it I found it helpful to read from the different points of views of each character.

I have the other books written by this author on my TBR and hope to get through them soon.

Thank you so much to the publisher for providing me with a copy of this E-book to review via Netgalley.

Simon Lelic is a fantastic author and I have read some of his other books which are fantastic

I was so excited to read this but unfortunately I couldn't relate to the characters who are mainly teenagers.
This book has a great, if familiar premise. Teenager Sadie goes missing and her friends decide that they will form the search party to find her as they feel that no-one knows Sadie or the town better than them.
This is a compelling story and I would definitely recommend it to young adult readers who are interested in the thriller genre

The search party follows an unusual format. The author uses a multi-narrative, telling the story of the key characters as they relay their story in a police interview. When 16 year old Sadie Saunders goes missing, her friends Abi, Cora, Mason, Fash, and her twin brother, Luke set out into the woods to find her.

Woven throughout these, we have the story of Detective inspector Fleet, both personally and professionally. and I particularly enjoyed this thread of the story.

It took me a while to get into the flow of the book. I suspect because of the frequent change of perspective and not being able to identify with the young characters. However, having said that, the author does a great job of creating atmosphere and building suspense, while we follow what happened in the woods, They also kept us guessing til the end and the final twist worked well.

Thanks to net galley for the ARC.

I’ve read an earlier book by Lelic and he was good then, and he’s good now - pulls every trick in the book but it [s more than ‘just’ entertainment, although it definitely is that - we care about these people, hunting each other down, and we learn about them as we go, just in time to be surprised. The ending is a great surprise ... it’s a kind of locked door crime story ... I like the variety of hunters. Really adept, and confirms my sense that this is a terrific writer I want to read again.

This is my first Simon Lelic and I'm not gonna lie - I just loved it.

#NoSpoilers but if you like Alex North, M W Craven, C J Tudor and Lucy Foley The Hunting Party, you'll be in the right space with The Search Party.

Twisty-turny plot, and characters I believed in from the get-go.

Mr Lelic's Search Party has been great company during lockdown.

Cracking Story. Highly recommend.

Thank you to Netgalley and the publisher for this review copy. Once I started this novel I could not stop reading until I had finished it. Loved the multiple narrators and the use of the potentially unreliable narrative POV. This was one of the best thrillers I have read in a while.

Well this book certainly keeps you guessing, wondering and thinking! I read it in one sitting and did not guess correctly the end.
I felt all kinds of emotions for all the characters, I liked and disliked them equally at different times.
At the beginning I felt lost and couldn’t keep track of what was happening but then felt maybe this is what the author wanted us to feel to add to the chaos of it all. If so, very cleverly written!!!
I wasn’t sure what was red herrings and what wasn’t but as a fan of thrillers I can now normally see what’s coming but this was a surprise, for me anyway.
It was refreshing to read and not know who did it but also the ‘need’ to know how this kids got into such a mess. I enjoyed the plot being centred around the teenagers and the messy ness of how they dealt with the fall out of these series of events. Enjoyable!!!

A teenage girl goes missing from a small seaside town and the local police investigate. She has been lifelong school friends with three other girls and four boys who seem to the police to know something about her disappearance. The group set out into the woods to search for their friend with unexpected consequences.

I saw this on netgalley and was intrigued by the cover. I hadn't read any of the books by Simon Lelic, but I thought I would give this a go. I am so glad I did. I was hooked straight away and was reluctant to put it down. I'm quite a slow reader but I read this on 3 sittings. I would recommend this to anybody who like mystery thrillers.

Starting with the aftermath of a two-day search by five teenagers for their missing friend, gone now for six days, The Search Party is a twisting thriller which keeps you guessing until the end.
Intertwined with the interviews of the teenagers, DI Rob Fleet has returned to his home town with his secrets of his own together with a failing marriage. Throughout the book, we are provided with different perspectives during the interviews, each one slowly peeling away layers of the whole story and all the time revealing just enough to keep you reading.
It took me a while to get to grips with the style of the police interviews and having the story of DI Fleet gives you a welcome break from the voices of the teenagers whilst at the same time wanting to gt back to their story.
A great read.

This is the first book I've read by this author but I thought the idea was an interesting one. This book was not described as a Young Adult read but that's what it felt like, especially with the young people being at the heart of the story.

Sixteen year old Sadie has gone missing and police expert Robin Fleet is called in to investigate in what was his home town. A search party of her friends went after Sadie and tragedy ensued, so it is down to Fleet to unpick their accounts of Sadie's disappearance and their time in the woods looking for her. However, Fleet is fighting his own demons and this case is dredging up his past with painful repercussions.

I found this book quite hard to get into - the switching between narrators was particularly hard as they often blended together in my mind and I couldn't remember who was who. The sections with Fleet were more enjoyable, although he was a bit of a cliche at times. The book does keep you reading to find out what happens - Lelic's skill lies in his writing of tension and twists. However (and unfortunately) I couldn't care enough about the squabblings of a bunch of teenagers so the payoff at the end was a bit underwhelming for me personally.

As a YA read, this would be good, I think - teenagers may be more invested in the characters than me. I did finish the book but it wasn't really for me.

An enjoyable read, quite hard to put down. It's actually quite hard to read too in the way the narrative switches between characters, at least in places. For me there are a couple of criticisms: I didn't feel that the narrative contained enough clues to the eventual outcome, and in 'police procedural' novels the 'buffoonish superior officer' has become a cliche. Surely not all officers of superintendent and above are over-promoted idiots (although no doubt some of them are). Similarly, the main protagonist is a flawed character who triumphs despite his shortcomings. This is becoming another cliche in this genre. However it was still a good read!

First time I’ve read this author and I’m sorry I gave up. I didn’t finish the book as I felt it should be for young adults. Not one for me!

Sixteen-year-old Sadie Saunders has been missing for a week. The police have been searching for her with no success. The local town thinks she is dead. So, her friends Abi, Cora, Fash, Mason and her brother Luke thinks that the police are looking in the wrong place. So, they all decide to go on a search to find her. They go into the woods to search for her when things start to go a miss. When they find their phones go missing and they are left without no water. Instead of turning back home they carry on looking. The police have searched the nearby river and the woods, and they do find the body but, it is not Sadie’s.
I have enjoyed Simon Lelic’s previous novels, The House and The Liar’s room. So I was excited to receive a copy of The search party. The premise of this story was good, and it gripped me from the start. The characters were well developed but, you couldn’t tell who was telling the truth and who was not. I really liked these two thirds of this book but after that I got a bit disengaged as it just talked about the teenagers arguing and the ending for me was disappointing. 3.5 stars from me.

A book that keeps you guessing up to the very end. I loved this book as it was written from each persons aspect of what did happen or what they thought happened.......
The concept and how it all came about was something that would realistically you could see how it would happen ..... when younger people have friends that get together and do something that are not really logical but at the time it is to them......

The build up to the ending is enthralling and almost sent me off track as the search party tried to make sense of what would have happened to their friend...... was she dead or was she alive..... the out come tells you and you do not know until that point......

A fantastic read and held me all the way through...... recommended if you like the twist and turns of a crime thriller

This is a gripping and unsettling novel about a group of teenagers. It moves between each of their points of view and that of the police officer investigating the murder of two of them. We know one of the kids who have been killed but the identity of the second remains a mystery almost to the end. Fleet, the police officer has his own demons to deal with along the way too.

The central premise of the book is good, and the detective is quite likeable. And as a general rule I don't mind a story being told from several perspectives. My problem here is the form that the teenage POV chapters took - the police interviews, with the questions removed, read like stream of consciousness ramblings with the kind of detail that no teenager would ever give to an authority figure. That's where the book lost me. And there was so much of it! I just found myself skimming all of those sections in a hurry to get to the next Inspector Fleet section.


From the blurb I thought this was a YA book but with Fleet being such a main character I checked and apparently this is adult? If that's the case it definitely misses the mark, but I'm not actually sure who I'd recommend it to! Anyway, I did quite like it and most of my issues boil down to personal taste.

I loved it. It is an easy read yet original in format and absolutely riveting. I had no clue until the very end who could have done what. A well written mystery to be enjoyed

The Search Party By Simon Lelic and My first Novel by said Author, We follow story of Missing Sadie Saunders and the said search party by her group of close nit friends.
The book is told from police interviews with the friends but they are not really interviews more monologues and I found this really distracting as each friend answers questions that we are not privy too.
The plot is slow moving and nothing really happens as one lie is uncovered until we finally get to the truth of what actually happened.
The book is well written and the main Detective Fleet is a fairly unremarkable character Lelic feels us in on some of his backstory.
All that being said I did feel the compulsion to continue to turn the page and at the end of the day that's what its all about.
The book kept me Guessing right up till the very end and overall it was an ok read.

I like to thank Netgalley and the publisher and Author for the early ARCH.

Just about worth your time and hard-earned cash.