Novel set in COPENHAGEN at Christmas
A ‘locked-room’ mystery set on an island in the ATLANTIC
12th November 2024
The Last Visitor by Martin Griffin, a ‘locked-room’ mystery set on an island in the Atlantic.
The Last Visitor is a thriller set on Navigaceo, one of the Ilhas Desertas situated in the Atlantic way off the cost of Madeira. I was wondering whether the location was a real one, and was about to do some research when I read the author’s piece at the end of the book…‘A final note on the setting.The Ilhas Desertas are real – Chao, Deserta Grande and Bugio exist and can be visited. However if you’re intent on seeing Navigaceo, I’m afraid you’ll be disappointed. Upon completion of this book, it mysteriously sank beneath the ocean waves, taking the lighthouse with it, never to be seen again.’
An ideal location for a ‘locked-room mystery! A conservation charity, Seawild, is organising a small expedition to the island to monitor the local seal population. They want to produce evidence to show that human visitors (it is rumoured the island is to become a tourist destination) would damage the seals’ ability to thrive – but is that the only reason the bosses of Seawild want to keep people away in the future?
Tess is the videographer for the exhibition. Navigaceo is a wild, desolate, and beautiful place. It has not seen a human on its shores for fifty years (supposedly). Tess is filming when she comes across a body in a cove on the island. Not a fifty year old body, but a much more recent one wearing the insignia of Seawild on its jacket. How and when did it get there? It ’emerges’ that there had been another Seawild expedition to the Ilhas Desertas a couple of years back, an expedition from which one member didn’t return. But if the body was that of this missing person how did it end up on Navigaceo? Had it been driven by the currents? The answer was an emphatic ‘no’. There was clear evidence that the person had been murdered where he fell…
The other members of the current expedition (excluding Tess) had all been on the previous visit to the islands. Why had she not been told this, was one of them the murderer? All in turn fall under her suspicion… Three days to go until the boat will come to pick them up and take them back to Funchal. It could be a long and dangerous three days. The situation is complicated by the facts a) that Tess works out why keeping tourists away from the island is so important and b) there is a feeling – soon backed up by reality – that the exhibition members are not the only people on the island. Who can trust whom… as a deadly game of cat and mouse comes into being? The denouement is violent, noisy and a tad scary.
A ‘locked-room’ mystery set on an island in the ATLANTIC, Last Visitor is a really good page-turning read.
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