West Heart Kill: A novel
Ratings8
Average rating3.3
15
Ratings8
Average rating3.3
LOOKING FOR AN ANYTHING-BUT-ORDINARY WHODUNIT? • Welcome to the West Heart Club. Where the drinks are neat but behind closed doors . . . things can get messy. Where upright citizens are deemed downright boring. Where the only missing piece of the puzzle is you, dear reader.
A unique and irresistible murder mystery set at a remote hunting lodge where everyone is a suspect, including the erratic detective on the scene—a remarkable debut that gleefully upends the rules of the genre.
“A thoroughly original suspense novel that hops across elements of the genre—a diabolical locked-room mystery interspersed with a fascinating primer on the form—while always being tremendous fun to read.”—Chris Pavone, best-selling author of Two Nights in Lisbon
An isolated hunt club. A raging storm. Three corpses, discovered within four days. A cast of monied, scheming, unfaithful characters.
When private detective Adam McAnnis joins an old college friend for the Bicentennial weekend at the exclusive West Heart club in upstate New York, he finds himself among a set of not-entirely-friendly strangers. Then the body of one of the members is found at the lake’s edge; hours later, a major storm hits. By the time power is restored on Sunday, two more people will be dead . . .
Reviews with the most likes.
Thanks to NetGalley for the ARC!
5 sparkly stars, with a crown on top! A favourite of the year for sure. What a brilliant read for mystery lovers and fans of unusually structured books!
But while I loved reading this, I wouldn't recommend it to every reader of mystery fiction.
If you've enjoyed, occasionally tongue-in-cheek, mystery books with a very strong meta element, like Everyone In My Family Has Killed Someone by Benjamin Stevenson or Eight Detectives by Alex Pavesi and you get a kick out of the puzzle element of Janice Hallett's novels, then you might want to check out West Heart Kill. I'm a fan of all those things and this was the perfect book for me!
On the other hand, if you want your mysteries to be straightforward and linear whodunits and you don't care about the genre and its history, then this might not be the book for you.
The story switches between the murder mystery part, set at a hunting club and an almost nonfiction-like, genre analysis part. On top of that, the text plays with different narrative perspectives. First-person, second-person, third-person - all there! I found it super interesting and had an extremely fun time reading. But if this is not what you want from your fiction, it has the potential to be incredibly irritating. Maybe even boring.
For me, everything in this just worked. The structure, the mystery itself, the thematic content!
I'll be thinking about this book for a while and I will most definitely be keeping my eye out for any future releases by Dann McDorman!
The book was a let-down based on the summary that I read and seeing the cover. I didn't like the world building of the book and the writing felt obnoxious to me. I stopped after around 77 pages.
