The last visitor

Tess Macfarlane, a British documentary filmmaker and investigative journalist, is hoping to give her career a boost by filming a research project for Seawild, an ecology organization. They are protecting the monk seals on Ilhas Desertas off the coast of Madeira, Portugal. Tess will be working with an international group of researchers on Navigaceo, the most remote island in the group, which has been uninhabited for 50 years, and she must document the team's work. She is surprised that the job offer was quick but signs on despite her unease. When she arrives, she finds a body while filming, and it is clear the body has not been dead for 50 years. As Tess continues filming and exploring the island, her equipment disappears, and other members of the team die. She must survive, and she does not know whom, if anyone, she can trust. Though few of the characters are truly likable (not a requirement for a compelling story, certainly), Griffin (The Second Stranger, 2023) has created an interesting variation on the locked-room mystery.

Griffin (The Second Stranger) impresses with this taut and inventive closed-circle whodunit. After winning acclaim for Spill, a muckraking documentary about a crooked oil company, Tess McFarlane went from "the UK's most promising young filmmaker" to "a cautionary tale" when she failed to get a sophomore project off the ground. Eager to turn her career around, Tess takes a job documenting the endangered seal population on the isolated island of Navigaceo--a few hundred miles off the coast of Madeira--for marine research foundation Seawild. Shortly after Tess and her team of researchers arrive on Navigaceo, she discovers a corpse wearing a Seawild uniform, challenging claims that no one has set foot on the island in decades. Tess's cohorts identify the dead man as one of their former colleagues, who disappeared two years earlier during an assignment on the nearby island of Deserta Grande, igniting Tess's suspicion that one of her current companions might have killed him--and could kill her next. Meanwhile, a DCI tries to get in touch with Tess about an open case concerning her partner on Spill. Griffin conjures a tense, paranoid atmosphere and steers the narrative in genuinely surprising directions. This sleek Agatha Christie update is a cut above similar fare. (Mar.)