The Game is Murder - Hazell Ward

THE GAME IS MURDER

HAZELL WARD

**

THIRTEEN GUESTS. THIRTEEN SUSPECTS. AN IMPOSSIBLE MURDER.

A MYSTERY YOU MUST SOLVE - OR FACE THE CONSEQUENCES...

What if a Great Detective reinvestigated the most famous unsolved murder case of the century?

What if that Great Detective was you?

You have been invited to a very special murder mystery party.

Thirteen guests have been gathered - rather, thirteen suspects.

But only one of them is a murderer. And only you can find them.

Your task is simple. Listen to the witnesses, examine the evidence, and solve the case.

Be careful. Trust no one. In this story, all may not be as it seems.

The ultimate murder mystery is yours to solve.

A word of warning, though - catch the killer, or face the consequences...

MY REVIEW

**

‘This book is about YOU. You are the Detective here. It’s up to you to solve the clues. And why not? Why should we have to do all the work?’

I was so excited to start reading The Game is Murder that I bumped it up my TBR list. A fan of puzzles, games and reading, I wanted to delve into the mystery and solve the case. The warning to the reader in the first chapter sets the standard – we are told it will require a lot of effort, that if you are a skim-reader or the kind of person who skips large paragraphs then this will not be for you. Upon reading this, I grabbed my notebook (which is incredibly unusual for me!) and started reading.

This book very much feels like a book of four parts and so I will review it as such. Act 1 is quite standard for a murder mystery, albeit one where you as the reader are placed into the narrative as a character – The Great Detective, and there are some asides from the narrator which directly address you as you are reading. There are 13 characters, and the case is laid out to you by the son of the accused at a party, with information from witnesses, friends, family and experts. With my notebook in hand, I started noticing some things that didn’t quite add up and I was excited to continue the story.

Act 2 then comes in and there’s a large twist which turns absolutely everything you have been told so far on its head. I certainly was not expecting what happened, but I still really enjoyed the twist and rolled with it, keen to find out more. I started to put the notebook down as there was a character introduced who was doing my working out for me. This part of the book started to introduce doubt into the story we had already been given, twisted the evidence and provided an alternative theory. The book also starts to get more meta as the narrator and the reader have conversations with each other outside of the events happening in the book.

Act 3 is where everything really fell off the rails for me. We are now in a courtroom drama, the twist setup that we were introduced to in Act 2 is suddenly revoked and all the information we have been told throughout the book is then needlessly relayed to us yet again. So much for the warning that the reader must pay attention – our concentration and attention to detail is being rewarded by the plot being spelled out to us as if we have never heard it before, let alone were trying to take notes!

Act 4 is the question-and-answer section which I suppose is where the book is trying to market itself as immersive. There’s a question about the case and three possible answers, each of which are around a paragraph long and each spell out the information that you have now heard multiple times throughout the book. There are over 30 of these questions! After the reveal I was actually left with a lot of unanswered questions which didn’t make sense in relation to ‘whodunnit’. I guess these had been put in as red herrings but with no payoff it was frustrating.

There is also a factual error which is repeated numerous times in the book which annoyed me. A blood expert reveals that blood on an object was blood type A (from one character), blood type B (from another character) and blood type AB, which, we are assured is either a third person or just a mixture of the two blood types. Cursory research will show that blood type AB is not created from A and B and would show as an entirely different blood type. In the end this evidence is not that important, but I did think something which felt wrong upon reading and is easily researched as being incorrect should not have been included.

Overall, The Game is Murder is such a fun premise (although one that I don’t think is everyone’s cup of tea), however the needless repetition of information after specifically telling us to pay attention felt frustrating. Acts 3 and 4 should be significantly trimmed down or re-written completely to create a book which lives up to the standard that the novel sets for itself in Acts 1 and 2. Thank you to NetGalley & Penguin Random House – Michael Joseph for the chance to read the ARC in exchange for an honest review.

LINKS TO BUY

Amazon UK Waterstones