The Last

This is a post-apocolyptic novel by Hanna Jameson that revolves around a group of people stuck in a remote Swiss hotel when most of the rest of the civilized world disappears in nuclear attacks. Told from the perspective of Jon Keller, an historian who was attending a conference at the hotel when social media posts began coming in that Washington had been attacked, and then London and then...well it was hard after that to get news. Jon was so upset that he threw his phone across the room, cutting himself off from further communication with his wife and two daughters.  He has decided to write down everything that happens in the hotel as a sort of final historical text, just in case someone, someday, reads it.
Some hotel guests of course immediately jumped in their cars and fled, thinking they would somehow be able to get home, back to loved ones. Others, realizing that there would probably be no flights, and that it would be equally if not more dangerous to head into Zurich, stayed put. So we get to know the various people who stayed. Some kill themselves almost immediately. Others are more tenacious. There are 3 remaining children, two belonging to a Japanese-German couple, and the third is an infant, orphaned by the suicide of her mother, but taken in by that same couple.  The hotel's head of security, Dylan, becomes the de-facto leader of the group. They are fortunate to have in this international mix a doctor and one of the hotel's chefs. There are rifles to shoot deer--the hotel attracted hunters--if they can find any alive. Jon, Dylan, and Nathan, the hotel's former bartender, form an alliance to keep things in order. They are the ones to discover, when checking the water tanks on the roof, the body of a young girl. Jon becomes obsessed with finding out who killed her. People try to maintain a veneer of civilization although it occasionally breaks down. Fear keeps them in place although they do make one foray to a grocery store in a suburb an hour away looking for food and medication. There Jon comes face to face with two former colleagues who try to kill the group from the hotel. With winter approaching, they must again venture out, but this scouting party does not return. So Jon and Rob, an English student, go looking for them, are attacked but survive, and then discover there are still people living in the city. There are a lot of red herrings in the story--a haunted history of the hotel, Jon's gradually returning memories of the first couple days, etc. and some wild things thrown in at the end. Although slow to start, it was intriguing to watch the dynamics, wonder who was sane and who was losing it. Kirkus and Publishers Weekly agree it is a compelling read marred only slightly by the rather bizarre ending.