Motley crew’s weekend retreat turns deadly

Is it even possible to invite a bunch of your longest, oldest, dearest friends and their kids (and their deepest, darkest secrets) to the middle of nowhere for the weekend and have everyone still alive on Monday morning?

Not in U.K.-based author Hannah Richell’s latest absolutely brilliant novel The Search Party, published in January.

Oh dear.

Notice we haven’t said it’s a murder mystery. Is it? Not telling.

We know it opens with someone referred to only as “the girl” launching herself off the top of a cliff as a male voice urges her on — maybe behind her, maybe giving her a nudge, maybe only in her head.

The six old friends (and two more recent partners, still trying to gain acceptance) are to spend the weekend away from London on the wildest coasts of Cornwall, where two former architects have abandoned the rat race to open up a glamping camp.

What better way to test it than to invite their closest buds and their assorted darling children?

Your book club may be chirping up with some very much better ways, but luckily, Richell didn’t listen.

The host couple have adopted a young boy with an awful background. He’s challenging, their friends whisper; he’s a handful, he’s really giving them a run for their money, he’s (pause to make sure you’re not being overheard) trouble, say their friends before getting out of their cars and pasting on their insincere smiles. Yes, as the cliché goes, smiles that don’t reach their eyes.

The story runs over four days, Friday to Monday, and as the template goes these days, every chapter is from the perspective of a different character. Many of the chapters involve our cast giving interviews to the police, which segue into individual memories, often shaped by massive amounts of alcohol.

As we progress, it’s clear the police interviews are taking place on Sunday, there are expository flashbacks from Friday, but we’re beginning to get hints that something quite dreadful happened on Saturday, which the glampers and police know about but which Richell is not yet ready to let them share with us.

And up pops the occasional Monday brief chapter from the area hospital, though we don’t know who is in the hospital bed or how she or he got there.

And what’s that, detective inspector, you found what at the base of the cliffs? And you won’t share what you know with readers because…?

Richell grips us and doesn’t let go.

Things start to get out of control quickly on Friday night in ways you won’t find divulged here. Everyone likes their booze, the men aren’t contenders for Dad of the Year, the women have mastered judgmentalism. The mob of kids, well…

One man is known nationwide as the resident bully on a reality TV music talent show, on which his job is to humiliate amateur musicians. Surely he can’t be like that in real life. Surely not.

One person is a waste of oxygen who’s borrowed an enormous amount of money from another guest for his latest business, which he has yet to start. He did it without telling his spouse.

It’s a rule in such books that whenever there are kids around, who begat whom may be in question.

One character met her partner exactly a year ago and together they’re raising a five-month-old girl. Dandy little family, baby the apple of daddy’s eye — so why are readers muttering and doing basic arithmetic in their heads?

There are married people happily enjoying lustful adult bedroom activities with people to whom they, rather awkwardly, don’t happen to be married to.

There’s even a child-rearing genius who thinks that bringing exactly two marshmallows for each child to a bonfire is a good idea.

And amidst all this, on Saturday a whopper of a storm moves in, scattering the kids all over the perilous coastline, knocking out power, closing roads, throwing the eight adults into various booze-fuelled combinations of confessional and accusatory moments, and — what do you mean you don’t know where the kids are?

Richell orchestrates it all masterfully, doling out tiny doses of information, leaving us in doubt just how many crises are percolating and having her diabolically clever way with us to our devilish delight.

Retired Free Press reporter Nick Martin has wisely maintained the pact of forever silence after the last time multiple large families gathered.