It's a curious thing to realise you hate someone so much you could kill them.
The Murder Game
by Tom Hindle
Genre: Murder Mystery
About: A small group of villagers gather for a New Year's Eve murder mystery party. Only the mystery element reads a little too close to a darker past in their small community. And when one of the guests is discovered murdered, the game becomes all too real. Is the man behind the clues teasing them? Or could one of the participants have been a hidden murderer for all of these years?
Thoughts
I listened to this as an audiobook and, unfortunately, hated the narration so I'm sure that didn't help with my enjoyment of the overall story. Nothing against the narrator, they did a good job, it's just these things are subjective and I didn't like the voice.
That said, I don't think I would have liked this book anyway. There are thirteen (I think) characters all in all, and about three personalities between them. Even dialogue is recycled. I heard one character say "Enough. Enough lies!" only for another character a few chapters later to repeat this word for word to the same person. Another instance was: "You're so young. I forget sometimes," which was said by two separate characters to different people. These were the most memorable instances but in general everyone sounded the same because they were repeating themselves and each other in pretty generic dialogue. And all of the characters try to solve the mystery in the same way: by yelling aggressively that they want answers and monologuing why it makes sense that they suspect person X. Another grating thing was that information was often kept from us by a character saying something like, oh, you're the only one who doesn't know this so it's not my place to say...
I did expect Detective Faye to bring something new to the table, but we may as well not have had any police presence because her character felt like another angry guest swinging wild accusations about. She was also another example of how anyone with ambition was written to be as unlikeable as possible, with the exception of Theo.
Spoiler section
While I can appreciate that this ticks all the boxes for a murder mystery - the characters all have secrets from their past and present, there are multiple deaths, murder weapons to find, alibis to question, an isolated location, and motives to unravel - the clues were not interesting. It's a lot of talking and every time we're given a clue, it points fairly obviously to the murderer. I guessed who was behind everything I think before the halfway point because it seemed evident that it was a woman and there was only Lily (whose POV exonerated her as it didn't seem unreliable), Gwen who was suspicious but mostly had an alibi for Damian's death, and then Claire. Claire who was undoubtedly Lily's mother. Nothing felt twisty. The only surprise I had was Ian being responsible for the vandalism.
And there were a few things that didn't make sense to me. Like how Lily didn't give a surname for the booking but surely the payment details would have had a surname. Or the fact that Ian wanted to bring more tourism to a hotel that doesn't have phone signals or WiFi. Or the moment when Ian goes crazy at Will for having a gun and believes he must be the murderer when, not too long ago, the other murder weapon was discovered in Ian's drawer. I mean of all people to jump to conclusions I would have thought Ian could have spared a moment to think that maybe discovering the murder weapon didn't mean discovering the murderer.
Overall, this felt so slow paced and boring, largely because it relies so much on conversation to give us information but the characters weren't distinct enough to make that conversations interesting. Of course this is entirely my subjective opinion. It does have all the elements of a murder mystery and, if you don't guess it, you might enjoy.
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