Club: A Novel — Murder at the world's most exclusive party

Look, I'll be honest with you. I started this one during a particularly tedious faculty meeting about standardized testing protocols, and by the time Principal Martinez finished explaining the new rubric system, someone had already died on Island Home. That's either a tribute to the pacing or a damning indictment of our meetings. Probably both.

Ellery Lloyd—which is actually a husband-and-wife writing team, and yes, I find that detail charming—has crafted something that feels like Agatha Christie crashed a Soho House party and decided to take notes. The premise is deliciously simple: ultra-exclusive celebrity club opens on a private island, beautiful terrible people gather, bodies start piling up. It's the kind of setup that practically writes itself, except it doesn't, because the execution here is genuinely clever.

The Ensemble Problem (That Mostly Works)

Here's where I need to channel my inner English teacher for a second. Multiple POV narratives are hard. Really hard. You're asking readers—or in this case, listeners—to invest in a rotating cast of characters, each with their own secrets and motivations, and somehow keep it all straight. Lloyd manages this better than most, though I'd be lying if I said I didn't occasionally lose track of who was sleeping with whom and why that mattered.

The characters themselves are a mixed bag. Some feel fully realized—the long-suffering assistant, the CEO with more skeletons than closet space—while others blur together into a kind of celebrity smoothie. But honestly? That might be the point. These are people who've cultivated images so carefully that there's not much person left underneath. It's social commentary dressed up as beach read, and I'm here for it.

Tamaryn Payne handles the narration with the kind of steady competence that this book desperately needs. With this many characters and POV shifts, a lesser narrator would've turned the whole thing into chaos. She keeps the story moving, gives each perspective enough distinction that you can follow along, and delivers the emotional beats when they land. Is it a virtuoso performance that'll make you forget you're listening to one person? Not quite. Some listeners found the constant character switching exhausting, and I get it. By hour seven, even I was occasionally thinking "wait, which one is she again?"

But here's the thing—the pacing is tight enough that it doesn't matter as much as you'd think. This isn't a slow literary meditation on the nature of celebrity. It's a propulsive thriller that keeps throwing complications at you until you're too invested to stop.

That same propulsive energy—where the plot mechanics matter more than literary flourishes—is what makes I Am Pilgrim such a page-turner, though Lloyd's execution here feels more deliberately crafted.

Where the Narrative Clicks

The setting does a lot of heavy lifting here. Island Home is exactly the kind of aspirational nightmare that makes you simultaneously want to visit and grateful you never will. Lloyd clearly knows this world—one half of the writing duo worked at Soho House, and it shows. The details feel specific and damning. The way staff are treated. The casual cruelty of people who've never been told no. The desperate scrambling behind the scenes to maintain an illusion of effortless luxury.

My students would probably call this "eat the rich" fiction, and they wouldn't be wrong. But it's more nuanced than that. Lloyd seems genuinely interested in the machinery of exclusivity—how it corrupts, how it traps, how it turns everyone into either predator or prey. There's real social observation here, even if it occasionally gets buried under the body count.

It reminds me of what Fitzgerald's short stories do so well—use a specific social world to examine larger truths about ambition and corruption—except Lloyd wraps hers in a murder mystery instead of a drawing room.

The mystery itself? Solid. Not groundbreaking, but satisfying. I figured out one of the twists early (twenty years of teaching teenagers to analyze foreshadowing will do that), but the others genuinely surprised me. And the final act moves with the kind of momentum that had me sitting in my car in the school parking lot, engine off, just needing to know how it ended.

Would I Assign This? (Probably Not, But I'd Recommend It)

This isn't Middlemarch. It's not trying to be. It's a smart, propulsive thriller that knows exactly what it is and executes that vision with confidence. The audiobook format works well here—Payne's narration keeps the pace brisk, and the nine-hour runtime feels about right. Any longer and the character juggling would've become genuinely tiresome.

If you loved Big Little Lies or any of the recent "wealthy people behaving badly" thrillers, this is your next listen. If you need deep character development and literary prose, you'll probably find this too plot-driven for your taste—skip it and reach for something weightier. But for a commute companion or a weekend binge? This delivers.

Just maybe don't start it during a faculty meeting. Principal Martinez was definitely giving me looks by the end.