West Heart Kill: A novel

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!