The Last Match

Rating: 2/5
Genre: Mystery/Thriller
Review Style: Spoiler Free
Anticipated Release: Feb. 2027

It’s different, I’ll give it that.

A thriller? Not really. I’d put this more in the mystery category, with an old treasure-hunt type of vibe.

There are a LOT of characters, and at times they started to blend together for me. I found myself having to stop and remember who was who and how they fit into everything.

There were also several things that just didn’t make sense.

For one, why wait this many years to do any of this? And why have one character wear the old clothes of one of the original matches? The matchmaker wasn’t there all these years, so he certainly wasn’t going to recognize someone’s clothes from decades earlier. I kept waiting for that detail to have some bigger significance, but it never really did.

Then there’s the matchmaking weekend itself. This was supposed to be a big weekend-long event centered around making matches, yet there weren’t really any matches made. Instead, everyone seemed to spend most of the weekend pursuing their own interests, worrying about their lives back home, or getting caught up in everything else happening around them.

There were a couple of twists that made things more interesting. I especially liked the reveal involving one character’s version of his previous relationship. Finding out that the story he had been telling wasn’t true and was really something he created to cover his own embarrassment was one of the better surprises.

Unfortunately, the rest of the story never quite lived up to the potential of the premise.

A woman dies, and basically no one stops to care? The weekend just...continues? The police don’t question the guests, people are still running around doing their own thing, and everyone seems remarkably unconcerned that someone just died in the middle of all this.

Meanwhile, so much of what is happening connects back to events from decades ago, but even that part of the story never felt fully explained. We get pieces of what happened, but not enough detail to make everything that follows feel completely earned.

There was definitely an interesting story buried in here. The setting, the history, the secrets, the matchmaking concept and the mystery all had the potential to make this a really fun read. Unfortunately, there were too many characters, too many unanswered questions and too many moments where I found myself thinking, “But why would anyone do that?”

Different? Absolutely.

Did it live up to what it could have been? Not quite.

I received an advance copy of this book in exchange for an honest review. The anticipated publication date is Feb. 2027.