Book Review: The Resort by Sara Ochs

Cass Morris has run away from her old life in the USA and found refuge on the Thai island of Koh Sang, falling in with a group of expats who work for and around the resort there. She fell in love with scuba diving shortly after arriving, and now works as one of the resort’s dive instructors. She also fell in love with Logan, a handsome bar owner originally from Scotland. They’ve recently moved in together and gotten engaged. Cass feels some qualms about not telling him about her past, but is more fearful that he’ll leave her if she does. Worse, she fears that the rest of the expats, who call themselves the Permanents, would shun her, forcing her to leave the one place where she’s felt safe and accepted for the first time in years.

Her carefully crafted new life begins to fall apart when she stumbles across a corpse caught on an outcropping of coral while she’s leading a routine diving lesson one morning. Her immediate fear is that the spotlight of a criminal investigation will reveal the past she’s worked so hard to flee. But she’s not the only one who fervently hopes that the girl’s death was an accident, as Logan emphasizes to a tourist:

“Yes, an accident,” he says coldly. “You come to an island with strong currents and rocky cliffs, and you combine that with wee kids who don’t know how to hold their booze traveling alone for the first time in their lives, and that’s what you get. Accidents.”

 

My stomach muscles clench as I feel Logan’s frustration bubbling inside him. He doesn’t need to explain it. All of the Permanents understand what will happen if the police determine [her] death wasn’t an accident. The salacious headlines, the canceled bookings, the lost profits. The resort can’t afford that. And neither can we.

Unfortunately for the Permanents’ peace of mind, the woman Logan is talking to is no mere tourist. Brooke might look like your typical Instagram influencer, but the captions beneath her shots of stunning landscapes and gorgeous selfies belie the depth behind the airbrushed persona she carefully cultivates. Having finished a tour of Eastern Europe, she’s now in Southeast Asia, on what looks like the typical influencer travel circuit. 

Brooke, however, is really on Koh Sang with a mission. Having grown up poor and dreaming of both travel and a career in journalism, she scrapes by the best she can:

That was how the @BrookaTrip persona came about. People couldn’t care less about the stories I told of all the places I visited, but they will pay good money to advertise their products through a scantily clad woman with a sizable Instagram following and decent photography skills.

 

But this could be it. The story I had planned to write about this island just got a whole lot more interesting with [her] death. It would have emotion, suspense, everything a good story needs. It would surely get picked up on some regional—or maybe even national—outlet. This could be my big break.

With a journalist’s instincts, Brooke will stop at nothing to unearth the truth about what happened not only to the girl Cass found, but to the other people who have also mysteriously perished in recent weeks. The Permanents have been more than willing to look away from the series of unexplained deaths, but Brooke will not let them lie. As her ambitions put her on a collision course with Cass’ desperate attempts to hold on to a comfortable life, will either woman realize that they just might be better off working as allies, before it’s too late?

There are sizable twists in this tale of murder in paradise, with perhaps my favorite one being a sly flourish on the subject of how deeply entitled certain expats feel when it comes to protecting the ways of life to which they’ve grown accustomed, never mind the consequences to anyone else who happens to live there. I did find it curious that the only actual Thai people in the book are never named, and are either criminals or police officers. It was fascinating, though, to see Cass and Brooke’s relationship evolve as their secrets finally came to the surface, with all the complicated repercussions thereof.