The Last Visitor: A Novel
The uninhabited Ilas Desertas are desolate islands populated by a few rabbits and endangered monk seals, and they really exist, part of the Portuguese Madeira Archipelago, some miles off the Moroccan coast. Or at least three of them do. The fourth, Navigaceo and its 19th century lighthouse, where The Last Visitor’s action takes place, had a unique fate. The author informs us in his Acknowledgements, “Upon completion of this book, it mysteriously sank beneath the ocean waves, taking the lighthouse with it, never to be seen again.”
Whether real or not, Navigaceo is a lovely place to set a fast-paced thriller. Martin Griffin is coming off his first one of these books, the well-received The Second Stranger, and he keeps everything moving along briskly. Tess is a documentary filmmaker, whose hugely anticipated debut work, Spill, about oil company chicanery, went spectacularly wrong. The details of that unfold slowly.
Now a former wunderkind, Tess is trying to rebuild her reputation and bank account, and an invitation to Navigaceo with an environmental group, Seawild, that wants to document those procreating monk seals is quite welcome. It almost sounds relaxing.
So Tess goes to the island, spends four uneventful days with the scientists and the seals, and then comes home with her footage and reams of marine mammal data. Right? Wrong! Quite early in the book a decaying body is discovered on the island, which supposedly hasn’t seen a human visitor in 70 years. What’s more, the decedent is wearing a Seawild jacket. And he didn’t die peacefully.
“The stains around his clothing weren’t volcanic rock dust,” Tess observes. “They were blood. I was looking at a hole made by a blade.”
It soon transpires that the only possible murder suspects, part of a previously undisclosed expedition two years ago, are right there with Tess on the island. There’s only three of them, and all are acting suspicious in one way or another. Red herrings abound. Maybe they’re all guilty.
Griffin has a good time presenting the four days on the island, with Tess first suspecting one of the party, then another, and intercutting it with flashback sections on the making of Spill. There are abundant mysteries, a vanishing cellphone, a swallowed key, a sabotaged radio, a mysterious shadow captured on film, a security-clearance ID card, a brewing storm, various conspiracy theories. There is much sneaking around after lights out.
Most environmental expeditions are, of course, fairly peaceful, with a nice writeup in National Geographic the ultimate goal. This one could star Scarlett Johansson or Anya Taylor-Joy, if the filmmaker’s story is itself made into a film. The screenwriter wouldn’t even need to add the cliffhanger ending with Tess confronting the newly revealed bad guy on the rusting balcony of the ancient lighthouse. It’s already in the book, quite dramatic, and a bit farfetched.