Hanna Jameson

Jon, an American historian at a Swiss conference, discovers nuclear weapons have been fired at breakfast. Thwy know most major cities have been destroyed before they lose media signals. Most people try to leave but he and a small remnant of guests and staff choose the safety of the hotel. There's no internet, and power starts to run low. They decide to check on the water supply and find a small child, drowned in the tank on the roof. Which one of the survivors is a murderer? Dystopian show more fiction is pretty popular but I liked how Jameson took risks with a less than perfect narrator, a spiky cast of fellow residents and the threat of something or someone creepy in the woods.

A Netgalley book. show less

I pre-ordered this book, based on positive reviews of ARCs.

I was hooked by the idea of a murder mystery being investigated by an American academic stranded in a remote Swiss hotel when a nuclear war kicks off.

The book arrived in my audible library today and I dived right in.

I abandoned the book at 10%, with the body discovered but the murder investigation not yet underway, because nothing about the setting made any sense.

I think the problem is that I lived in Switzerland for sixteen years show more and I'm very familiar with its hotels, with its government and with its arrangements in the event of a nuclear war.
Hanna Jameson seems to be writing about an alternative Switzerland that I've never visited.

The real Switzerland is a densely populated and there are no hotels that are remote in the Amerian sense of the word. There are always villages and towns nearby, even in the mountains. Local government is strong in Switzerland. The local Commune would never leave people abandoned at a hotel. The Civil Defence organisation would manage allocating people to local nuclear bunkers. Every village would have a pharmacy, often two or three, so you'd never have to head out to a "superstore" to find medical supplies. The hotel would hold the passports of all guests so their occupations and personal details would be known whereas, in the book, we get a list of "occupation unknown" statements.

The hotel in the book has fourteen floors and almost a thousand rooms. This is very unlikely. Switzerland isn't Vegas. You don't get hotels this large except in the biggest cities and even then they're rare. A hotel that size would have hundreds of staff and strong ties to the local community. Hanna Jefferson seems to be writing about a big resort hotel in Maine à la "The Shining".

Then there's basic physics. The hotel manager decides to save (as in store up) electricity by cutting power to floors above a certain height. How does this save electricity? Hotels are not battery powered in Switzerland. This is like Tom Sawyer painting faster because he's running out of paint.

The only person who is actually described as Swiss in this book has a very American name. Then we have people described as Swiss-Russian. This doesn't exist. I can see Swiss French and Swiss German but there is no Swiss-Russian.

I should probably find these things less distracting than I do but if you decide to set a novel in a real place, some basic research would help. If I can't believe the setting, why should I believe anything else?

Perhaps I'd have stuck with this if the main character hadn't been such a zero-charisma wimp. An academic historian who seems to lack the ability to think things through. Perhaps he's just drifting along in shock but that doesn't make him a great choice as the POV to write the story from.

Maybe there's a fascinating murder mystery here, which, if it were reset on an abandoned space station or a hotel in Alaska, I'd find fascinating. I'll never know as I've already returned the book to Audible. show less

If I were to describe this as country-hotel murder mystery meets World War Three you'd think this book must be rubbish, but that's actually what it is. On the day that global thermonuclear war annihilates most of human civilisation, historian Jon Keller is attending a conference at a remote hotel in Switzerland. In the ensuing panic most people either leave the hotel, or commit suicide, leaving just 20 survivors holed up in a 1000 room building. Jon and his fellow survivors then find that a show more little girl has been murdered and Jon begins an investigation to find the truth and determine whether the killer is in their midst. As Jon becomes obsessed with finding justice for the little girl, his fellow survivors become frustrated. Does the girl matter when so many have died, and when they have a more immediate problem with replenishing their supplies and surviving the apocalypse? Is the killer still at large? Are there more people in the hotel than they know about.
I really enjoyed this book, which bridged the space that lies between murder mystery, suspense (this hotel has a murky history) and the post-apocalypse narrative. It is a contemporary story and although the former orange President of the USA was not mentioned by name it appears that the war broke out due to other nations losing patience with his foreign policy and America First approach. There are some interesting passages where the Americans in the hotel have to face the anger of the others due to the way they had voted. The author fleshed out all of the characters in the hotel to great effect and wove them all into a compelling narrative. The recounting of Jon's reaction to the news that Washington had been nuked was spectacularly realistic. The idea was actually very clever. As the action is set in a hotel, the cast of characters is mostly unknown to each other and have little in common, so as they learn about each other, the reader learns too. For several of the characters there is more to them than meets the eye. Secrets and lies abound, or is that just Jon's imagination? Global catastrophe is perhaps not the most heart-warming subject at any time, but right now is particularly difficult to embrace, but this was an enthralling read which also offered a happy(ish) ending to remove the sting.
I gather that Netflix has got some options on turning The Last into a film and I think it might do well in that format. Unless they stuff it up of course. It's not unknown for adaptations to be botched. I don't think I will ever get over my fury at Peter Jackson for his butchery of The Hobbit. I wait with bated breath to see whether Dune has suffered a similar fate (though am super-excited that in my new vaccinated state, going to the cinema should be a viable option). show less

Having read and loved The Last by Hanna Jameson, I was really looking forward to this one. It’s a subject that feels all too familiar – a global pandemic (although mainly affecting America) – and a small cast of characters trying to live through it.

The book opens at a wedding and the start of a budding relationship when Yun and Emory meet for the first time. However, when a wedding guest simply sits down and can’t, or won’t, get up, this heralds the start of a terrifying show more phenomenon. Gradually, thousands of people fall victim to this mysterious illness or syndrome, simply sitting down without warning. Nobody ever recovers, and after two or three weeks, the ‘sitter’ dies.

Yun and Emory are trying to navigate this situation while at the same time trying to make their own relationship work, despite their various issues. Meanwhile, Yun’s oldest and best friend Andrew is in a failing marriage and when he meets dancer Fin, he realises that it’s time to stop the lies he has been telling everyone, including himself, his whole life.

I can’t say that I didn’t enjoy this book, but after looking forward so much to reading it, I have to admit I was slightly disappointed. The pandemic, or phenomenon is more of a backdrop to the main story here, which is the relationships between the four main characters. Unfortunately the parts about the pandemic were the most interesting to me by far. I do normally like character driven stories, but the issue here was that I found it difficult to really care about them. Yun and Emory were not particularly sympathetic, and while I don’t have to like characters to enjoy reading about them, I just found myself getting annoyed with their angsty self-absorbed outlooks. Andrew and Fin were more likeable and I did care more about them; however at least three of these four seemed bent on self-destruction and I found myself lacking patience.

That’s not to say I didn’t like the book, and it’s certainly not to say that I wouldn’t read more by Hanna Jameson, because I definitely would. But unlike The Last, the characters in this one just didn’t gel with me, so ended up feeling slightly let down. show less