A glamorous birthday dinner in the Hollywood Hills ends with the famous host dead and every guest under suspicion in this dark, cinematic suspense debut reminiscent of an Agatha Christie page-turner crossed with David Lynch's Mulholland Drive.
When actress Elspeth Bell attends the fiftieth birthday party of her ex-husband Richard Bryant, the Hollywood director who launched her career, all she wants is to pass unnoticed through the glamorous crowd in his sprawling Los Angeles mansion. Instead, there are just seven other guests--and Richard's pet octopus, Persephone, watching over them from her tank as the intimate party grows more surreal (and rowdy) by the hour. Come morning, Richard is dead--and all of the guests are suspects.
In the weeks that follow, each of the guests come under suspicion: the school friend, the studio producer, the actress, the actor, the new partner, the manager, the cinematographer, and even Elspeth herself. What starts out as a locked-room mystery soon reveals itself to be much more complicated, as dark stories from Richard's past surface, colliding with Elspeth's memories of their marriage that she vowed never to revisit. Elspeth begins to wonder not just who killed Richard, but why these eight guests were invited, and what sort of man would desire to possess a creature as mysterious and unsettling as Persephone.
The Last Guest is a stylish exploration of power--the power of memory, the power of perception, the power of one person over another. Tess Little is a writer, historian, and fellow of All Souls College, University of Oxford. She was born in Norwich and studied history at the universities of Oxford and Cambridge. She is currently working towards her doctorate, on transnational connections in 1970s feminist activism. Her short stories and nonfiction have appeared in Words & Women: Two, The Mays Anthology, The Belleville Park Pages, The White Review, and on posters outside a London tube station. The Last Guest is her first novel.
