Published By: Bantam
Pages: 368
Released On: 05/06/2025
In this interactive crime novel, step into the shoes of a detective and investigate the most mysterious crime of your career.
There’s been a murder at Elysium, a wellness retreat set in an English country manor. You arrive to find the body of a local businessman on the lawn – with a rose placed in his mouth. It appears he was stabbed with a gardening fork and fell to his death from the balcony above. But that balcony can only be accessed through a locked door, the key is missing, and everyone in Elysium is now a suspect…
Gather the evidence and examine the clues. Choose who to interview next, and who to accuse as your prime suspect. But remember that every decision you make has consequences – and some of them will prove fatal…
Do you have what it takes? Can YOU solve the murder?
*****
Thanks to NetGalley and Bantam for the advanced copy of this title in return for an honest review.
I will say this review won’t be as long or detailed as some of my others as it’s very difficult to do justice to the novel without spoiling it, and I don’t want to do that.
This sounded soooooo good! I read so many thrillers and crime novels and murder mysteries that it’s so nice to find one that’s a bit different, that keeps the genre fresh – like I felt with Janice Hallett’s books.
In the contents, you’ll see there’s about 200 chapters or sections in this book which seems like a lot, but some of these sections are a sentence or two, so it’s not as overwhelming as it sounds. You also don’t real the sections in order. After each section, you get to choose where the story goes next, and it tells you which section to skip to, so don’t try to read it cover to cover because it won’t make sense.
I really don’t know how he’s managed it. No matter what option you choose at the end of the chapters, it all makes sense and you always get the whole story, it is simply remarkable. Antony says it involved a lot of flow charts but even that seems impressive to keep on top of. It is one of the cleverest books I have ever read, I just can’t get my head round it.
It’s not the best choice for a bedtime read though, as you need to have your wits about you, making notes as you go, as it’s not a straightforward read from beginning to end. Although, having said that, it didn’t stop me reading it late into the night.
I did have one slight issue though and that’s with the ending. Having finished it, it is a clever ending and in keeping with the rest of the book, but at the time it frustrated me and confused me, but that’s my only issue and it’s only a slight one.
Once you get to the end of the story, you can tot up all the points you’ve collected throughout the book (don’t worry, it’ll make sense once you read it), and it will see how good a police officer you could be, and it turns out I was a Detective Inspector, which is the second from top, so hey, maybe that’s a new career path?
Books By Your Bedside 