The Last Party

Rhys Lloyd, a former opera singer, has recently built a series of luxury homes overlooking Mirror Lake, on the boundary between Wales and England. Neither the process nor the end results endear him to the locals, to say the least. To attempt to mend fences, and bring the townies and the posh lake crowd together, he throws a massive New Year’s Eve party, only to disappear in the middle of it. When Rhys’s body is found floating in the lake on New Year’s morning, no one seems all that surprised. Nor sad. Not the town folk, not his wife, and certainly not DC Ffion Morgan, who is assigned to the case. Ffion is a local, back home after a failed marriage, and her search for the killer brings her close to people she’s known her whole life, and close to secrets of her own. Against her wishes, she’s paired with DC Leo Brady from the English side of the lake, and they provide every sort of tension imaginable, from national to sexual, giving the book a good bit of levity. Like the TV series “Broadchurch” and the novels of Ann Cleeves, this wonderful novel takes the reader—through twists and turns, and red herrings aplenty—deep within a community. Crime fiction is a whole lot better now that DC Ffion Morgan has arrived.