One Last Scare by Bill Wood Review: The Sanera Four’s Frozen Finale

One Last Scare | Bill Wood | Scholastic | 8 October 2026 |

Scooby-Doo warmth, Scream blood, and a theme park built on a grave.

One Last Scare is the third and final book in Bill Wood’s Let’s Split Up trilogy, out now from Scholastic. This One Last Scare review looks at how Wood sends Cam, Jonesy, Amber and Buffy to Chillshore, a frozen island theme park built on an old tragedy, for one last slasher mystery. It has the warmth of Scooby-Doo and the blood of Scream, and it is the best thing Wood has written so far. I will keep this free of spoilers. What I will do is show you why this closing chapter earns all five of its stars, and why it is one of the sharpest YA horror novels of the year.

One Last Scare takes the Sanera Four somewhere colder, darker and far more honest than before. Bill Wood builds a theme park on a real grave and uses it to ask who profits from other people’s pain, all without losing the warmth and fun that made this trilogy worth caring about in the first place.

One Last Scare Review: The Park That Sells Its Own Dead

Every ghost train makes the same deal with you. Pay at the gate, sit in the little car, and we promise the dead in here are made of foam. The deal holds right up until somebody builds the ride on top of a real grave. Then the screams start to mean something else. And the people in the queue start to look a lot less innocent.

That is the ground Bill Wood stakes out in One Last Scare, and it is the smartest place he could have taken his Sanera Four. Cam, Jonesy, Amber and Buffy have solved two sets of murders by now. People know their names. In a small and slightly grubby way, they have become a brand.

So when Chillshore, an island theme park closed after a tragedy nobody ever fully explained, reopens as a spooky attraction that leans hard into its own past, of course the gang get an invite. Of course the other guests are horror influencers, true crime names and thrill seekers. And of course, once a storm cuts off the boats and the phones, the park’s masked mascot, the Groundskeeper, stops feeling like part of the show.

It is a set-up you can see coming from a mile off. That is the point. Wood has always written for readers who know the rules of the slasher film by heart, and he trusts you to know them here. The pleasure is not in being surprised by the shape of the thing. It is in watching how well he fills it.

Where the trilogy started

When I reviewed Let’s Split Up in 2024, I called it a love letter to the shows that shaped Wood as a kid, and I said I hoped it would grow into a series. It did. The first book, set in Sanera, California in 2001, sent four teens after the killer of the town’s golden couple, Brad and Shelley, at the old Carrington manor. It was a fun, fast mystery with a big heart, and dialogue that sounded like real teenagers rather than adults in costume. If you want to know where all this came from, my interview with Bill Wood on YA fiction and the appeal of Scooby Doo is the place to start.

Be Right Back, the 2025 sequel, moved the clock on to 2002 and brought the friends home from college for a Halloween festival. Over in the Young Blood Library, Tony Jones covered it in his YA Horror Round-Up Jan/Feb 2026: Must-Read Thrills, Zombie Classics & LGBTQ+ Chills, and he felt the sequel ran a little reheated, with the old Carrington Ghoul pulled out for one more lap.

That is a fair worry for any middle book. But look at what that festival was doing. It was a town party that cheered a killer and planned to turn a murder site into a museum. In other words, Wood had already found his real subject. He just needed a bigger stage for it.

Chillshore is that stage. A whole island, a whole business, built on dead people and sold back to the public as a fun day out. Book two hinted at the idea. Book three goes all in.

How One Last Scare Builds Its Trap

The book opens on a joke. Before we ever reach the island, the gang are deep in another case, a daft and campy caper that would not look out of place on a Saturday morning cartoon. I won’t quote it here, so take this as a description rather than a transcript, but it is worth slowing down on, because it tells you exactly how the novel works.

Wood starts in full cartoon mode. The tone is warm, the stakes are low, and the friends are clearly good at this. Then he takes that warmth and drives it out to a cold island where nothing is a costume. The jump from one to the other is the whole point. The cold open reminds you who these four were, how much fun mystery solving used to be for them, and how far they have come from that. By the time the first body turns up at Chillshore, the cartoon is gone, and you feel its absence like a draught under a door.

The Groundskeeper does the same job from the other side. He is a mascot first, a character the park has built to sell its own past as a ghost story. So when that figure starts to stalk the island for real, Wood does not have to explain why it is scary. The park has already done the work. It turned a tragedy into a brand, and now the brand has come back with a weapon. That is a neat trick, and a pointed one.

Reading this prose is like riding an old wooden coaster in the dark. It rattles. It is built for speed, not for scenery. You can feel every join in the track, and you can often guess where the next drop is coming. But the drop still gets you in the stomach, every time, because the car never slows down long enough for you to brace.

That speed comes from the structure. Like the first two books, One Last Scare is told by all four friends, each in the first person, in short chapters that hand the story on like a baton. Wood has said he has become more of a planner with each book, and it shows. Each death is placed with care. Each one opens up a piece of the island’s buried history, so the body count and the mystery move forward together, step for step

This is the darkest of the three by a distance. The setting does a lot of the heavy lifting. Swap Sanera’s sun for a frozen island and you lose every safety net the gang ever had. There are no parents down the road. There is no home turf. There are cabins in the woods, empty rides, dark storerooms and things waiting under the ice. The cold is not just weather here. It is a way of cutting the friends off from the world, and from each other.

Wood also knows when to stop joking. The humour is still there, and the banter still crackles, but it now sits next to real loss. The four are older, and the trilogy has not let them walk away clean. They carry the weight of the people who died in the first two books, and the guilt of having lived when others did not. Wood handles that survivor’s guilt with care. He never lets it turn into a lecture, and he never lets it sink the fun. It just sits in the room with them, which is how guilt tends to behave.

Partway through, he makes one big gamble with the story. I won’t go near the details. Some readers will feel it pulls a punch. I think it lands, because it tells you that Wood is willing to frighten his core readers, not just the guests in the cabins.

If I have a quibble, and it is a small one, it is that the four narrators still blur at times. Cam, Jonesy, Amber and Buffy are clear as people, but on the page their voices can sound alike, and now and then you need a line or two to work out whose head you are in. The first act also takes its time getting everyone onto the island. Neither of these comes close to denting the book. Once the storm hits, the pace does not let up.

Slashers, Spooky Islands and the True Crime Trade

The pitch for this series has always been Scream meets Scooby-Doo, and One Last Scare honours both halves. The Scooby side is in the gang, the masks and the joy of a clue. The Scream side is in the knowing nods, the body count and the sense that everyone on the island has seen a slasher film and still can’t stop walking into one. Fittingly, for a trilogy set in the early 2000s, Chillshore also carries a strong whiff of the 2002 Scooby-Doo film and its party resort on Spooky Island, though Wood swaps the sunshine for ice.

Set it next to Gretchen McNeil’s Ten, or Natasha Preston’s The Island, with its influencers trapped in a private amusement park, and you can see the family it comes from. Under them all sits Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were None, the mother of every island where the guests are counted down. Justine Pucella Winans’ How to Survive a Slasher is perhaps the closest cousin in spirit, since both books ask what it means when real horror gets packaged for fans.

That question is where One Last Scare pulls ahead of the pack. Wood has been circling the true crime trade since book one. The friends became small-scale celebrities. Their cases became stories other people told for profit. Here, the whole island is a product built on a death count, and its guest list is full of people who make a living from other people’s worst days. By setting the trilogy before the rise of the always-on internet, Wood shows us the early workings of a machine we now take for granted. He does not let his heroes off the hook either. They took the money to come here too.

And then there is the heart. Cam and Jonesy’s relationship has never been treated as a problem to be solved, and it is not one here. The friendship between all four is still the reason to read these books, even as it strains under the weight of what they have lived through. Rick Field, the series’ resident thorn, is back as well, and Wood gives him more room than ever. Wood has said Rick was his favourite to write this time, and that pleasure is plain to see.

The best finales do not just tie things off. They tell you what the whole story was about. One Last Scare does that. Across three books, Wood has been writing about what happens after the mask comes off, when the case is closed but the dead are still dead and the world wants to sell you the story. He set out to write a fun slasher for teens. He has ended up with something that has real teeth.

Pay at the gate, sit in the little car, and trust Bill Wood with the last drop. The dead on this ride are not made of foam, and that is exactly why it works.

The Verdict: Is One Last Scare Worth Reading?