Like I said up top, this resembles And Then There Were None so closely that it’s hard not to draw the comparison constantly - and once you do, this book loses almost every round.

The biggest gap for me is the deaths. Here, they’re pretty much all just chalked up to the haunted house, which is awfully convenient. One character falls through a trap door, quite a few simply get eaten by the house, and so on. Compare that to Christie, where so much thought went into every single murder - how it happened, who did it, how the culprit stayed hidden. There was a mastermind running the whole thing from behind the scenes, and the reveal of the judge as the orchestrator, followed by the explanation of exactly how he pulled it off and what clues the police would eventually find, was just outstanding. Nowhere near that level of craft went into the deaths here, so they end up far less interesting.

What is strong is the backstory. The stories of all seven characters and what each of them did to Mortimer to earn his revenge - that was probably the best part of the book. Juggling seven points of view and still telling a cohesive story while conveying each character’s distinct inner voice is genuinely hard, and the author pulls it off. For a debut, that’s seriously well executed.

The mystery itself, though, was a little predictable. I had Melanie pegged as the one responsible fairly early. She’s the perspective we enter the house through, we get far more detail about her life than anyone else’s, and she’s the one character who isn’t an accomplished author. Add the foreshadowing about her not having anything to write about, and I pieced it together - she’d be the one to kill all the others, and that would become her new novel. I was spot on.

A couple of things struck me as off:

1. Apart from Chester, what everyone else did to deserve Mortimer’s revenge was genuinely heinous, and I understood his motivation. But Chester? He really didn’t do much wrong. A teenager stalks and chases him to his hotel, he’s a bit rude and tells her to get lost - and that’s it. He can’t control whether she jumps off a roof. He didn’t push her. He didn’t do anything that comes close to a serious offense, so lumping him in with the others felt unfair and unearned.

2. This one I find more ridiculous. Because the author wanted readers to slowly unravel what’s happening, she couldn’t show Melanie as the killer/accomplice from the start - otherwise her inner dialogue would give the game away. So the book takes an easy cop-out: after Mortimer and Melanie’s chat about the plan, she conveniently bangs her head and forgets all about it, only to remember at the exact moment she needs to lock Buck in the basement. That’s not how memory works. You can’t hit your head and selectively forget the one thing you need to forget, then recall it precisely on cue.