Published By: Headline
Pages: 384
Released On: 07/11/2024
Seven people wake up in a remote mansion. The doors are all locked.
They have no idea where they are. Who brought them there. Or how to escape.
Each knew the victims of a dreadful crime committed four years earlier but that’s all that links them.
Then a voice echoes through the house with a terrifying message.
They’ve been poisoned – and have less than 12 hours to live.
There’s an antidote on hand: but only if someone admits to being a killer.
And they all claim to be innocent.
The time for confession is rapidly running out.
How many – if any – of them will survive the night?
*****
Thanks to NetGalley and Headline for the advanced copy of this title in return for an honest review.
This is my first Simon Kernick book and I was interested to look at his other ones. I think thrillers are my most read genre and so it was great to discover a new author.
It is quite difficult to review this without spoiling it, so it will probably be a relatively short review.
There are a number of characters who all seem to have something in common but it’s not immediately clear how. They’re all suspects but they could all be victims. Are main characters are:
Colton Lightfoot (our main narrator, as it were), Adam and Sanna, DCI Hemming, Gary Querell, Kat Warner, and Yuri Karnov. They’re our key names.
I can’t say I liked the characters much. Not that they’re badly written, no, they’re well written and I think that’s why I had such bad opinions on them. There is almost a caricature-ness about them, but in a good way. They’re everything to the extreme: they’re rough, lying, desperate, hating, loving, suspicious, brutish- it’s all dialled up. But I didn’t really have much compassion for any of them and so there wasn’t any one that I felt particularly worried for, or anyone I particularly wanted to be found guilty.
It is interesting because for the most part, it’s set in just the one location. This can be hard to do well, it can often cause the story to be quite dull and repetitive if you don’t have that change in scenery. But it adds heaps of tension to an already tense story, with the added claustrophobia that you may be sharing a room with a murderer.
There are flashbacks to the night of the murders and the immediate aftermath and we get to know how the characters fit together. I think I preferred these scenes. The present scenes are good but limited, whereas the flashback scenes have more scope and there’s more to get your teeth into.
You do have to suspend belief a little bit as to how feasible the plot is. But I didn’t mind it so much because I think for all thrillers and murder mystery type books, they all need a bit of acceptance that it makes sense in the context of the entire book.
It was an interesting idea: what are you willing to do to save yourself? Can you trust anyone? Can you trust yourself? Who do you suspect? Are you a suspect?
I will say for me that it felt a little too long. Annoyingly, I can’t say what would need cutting frrom it in order to shorten it, but I did get the general feeling that it dragged slightly, so maybe it just needs a little tidying up.
It’s not the best thriller I’ve ever read, but it is pretty good and I am interested in his other books. It’s needs tidying up slightly for me, but overall it is engaging, intriguing, and surprising. And the conclusion really did surprise me, which is the sign of a good thriller. I had my suspicions abut nothing concrete, and it was more detailed and layered than I initially thought.
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