The Last Time We Drowned by Saratoga Schaefer [Book Review]

A luxury influencer yacht, a billionaire boss, and a hurricane trapping everyone at sea? The Last Time We Drowned turns curated paradise into a claustrophobic nightmare with better lighting.

Rating: 3.25 out of 5 stars

I have never once encountered a fictional influencer house that seemed like a healthy place to be. Add a luxury yacht, a billionaire boss, a hurricane, and a cast of women with meticulously branded personalities, and the red flags stop being flags. They’re full maritime signal flares.

That’s The Last Time We Drowned — a locked-door thriller that swaps the usual haunted mansion for a floating content machine off the Florida Keys. Glossy, claustrophobic, and unhinged.

Welcome Aboard Empress

Charlie Engels is broke, freshly betrayed, and emotionally held together with duct tape when her bookstagram account lands her a spot on Empress — a yacht-slash-influencer-paradise that she can’t afford to turn down.

Brand deals. A built-in audience. A “sisterhood” of internet-famous women. Charlie’s not naive; she’s just desperate, and desperate people ignore lifelines with strings attached.

The strings show up fast. Everyone on Empress has a role: the magnetic leader, the spiraling fashion girl, the twins who finish each other’s captions, the peacemaker who’s holding on by a thread. And then there’s the influencer Charlie’s replacing, who supposedly quit.

Charlie keeps seeing her anyway.

Haunting? Manipulation? Is Charlie unraveling and losing her mind? Or is she being gaslit? The book keeps you guessing longer than you’d expect.

Influencer Paradise Is Obviously Hell

The setting is where Schaefer really delivers. Empress starts out aspirational in that specific, unsettling social-media way — curated luxury, performative closeness — and then the storm rolls in, the signal dies, supplies run low, and the dream job turns into a trap with better lighting.

What I liked most is the performance-versus-reality thread running under everything. Nobody on this boat clocks out. Their friendships are branded, their vulnerability is content, and their personalities have been sanded down into something marketable. It’s satire with real teeth, not just a boat full of punchlines, because underneath the mean-girl gloss is something genuinely sad: these women aren’t just performing for followers. They’re performing for each other, for their boss, for themselves.

Where It Wobbles

As a thriller, it’s absolutely bingeable — the mood is strong, the claustrophobia lands, and the social media commentary gives it more to chew on than a standard whodunit. But the mystery itself doesn’t always earn its premise. A few twists telegraph themselves early, and some of the characters stay a little thin for how juicy their setup is. I wanted the reveals to hit harder, given how much time the book spends winding up.

The tone wobbles too — it swings between psychological thriller and ghost-story dread, and those two modes occasionally compete rather than work together. Still, I was never bored.

Final Verdict

The Last Time We Drowned is a great atmospheric popcorn read with a strong premise, a killer setting, and pages that keep turning even when the underlying mystery isn’t quite as sharp as I’d like.

Would I recommend it? Yes — especially if you’re into locked-room thrillers, influencer satire, hurricane-based cabin fever, and glamorous people making catastrophic choices.

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