West Heart Kill by Dann McDorman

 

 

288 pages

Publisher: Raven Books

Publishing Date: October 24, 2023

Netgalley

 

Blurb

'Any respectable practitioner must follow the rules in making the truth - however skilfully camouflaged by lies - accessible to all'

It's the Fourth of July weekend at the prestigious West Heart country club. Gathered for cocktails on the first evening are just some of the guests: the club president, the treasurer and his pregnant wife, the snooping school boy, the bereaved father, the taciturn caretaker, the prospective member, the private detective...

And there will also be a body.

And a fiendish mystery to solve.

But everything else is to play for.

And you are about to find out that you have a role to play in this mystery too..

West Heart Kill is an outrageously original and imaginative murder mystery that is both a love letter to the greats of classic crime fiction and a brilliant puzzle the likes of which you will never have read before.

 

Review

When a blurb states that the mystery in the book is ‘a brilliant puzzle the likes of which you will never have read before’ it is hard not to see that statement as a challenge. Therefore: challenge accepted. 😊

Brace yourself for a review filled with vagaries. So much of the plot depends on the things that make this story unique and surprising, and I wouldn’t want to ruin those discoveries for others. I do have a few things I want to say about the fascinating, original, surprising, and thought-provoking reading experience I just had, though.

The book starts with the narrator/author comparing West Heart Kill to all other murder mysteries. In fact, the book starts as if it hasn’t started yet, with the narrator describing what is happening, or going to happen, as if this is not the actual story yet but rather a description of what is to come. I’m going to stop relaying how the story is told soon, but I do want to add that the list of ‘dramatis personae’ has some parts of the description of individual characters blacked out. The text implies that the missing information would either tell the reader a lie or reveal too much.

I have to say a bit more about how this story is narrated after all because the second chapter is told from a first-person perspective, the third section shifts to the “we” of the first-person plural, and the book finishes as a play. Interspersed between the sections of murder mystery are apparently random theoretical facts about and opinions on murder mysteries and their authors. Except that nothing in this story turns out to be random. With one possible exception, although I can’t go into that. Which is probably just as well since I haven’t figured out how I feel about that yet.

If all of the above gives the impression that this book is anything but a mystery, allow me to reassure you. The components you’d expect in any whodunnit are all present here. We’ve got a private detective, deaths that need explaining, a locked room, and a closed circle of suspects, to mention a few familiar tropes.

But those are the bare bones. There is so much more going on. As an avid reader of the genre, I knew that everything on the page had to be in some way relevant to the mystery plot. And while a lot of what I read had me stretching my head in the moment, it all made a wonderful sort of sense when I reached the end of the book. If all you want from your mysteries is the traditional set-up of murder, followed by investigation, and denouement, this book may be too much for you. If, on the other hand, you enjoy discovering something new and being taken by surprise, you are going to love this story.

All too often the claim that the book a reader is about to start is unlike anything they’ve ever read before turns out to be a disappointing overstatement. Not this time. This time I fully agree with the last line of the blurb. West Heart Kill is indeed an

outrageously original and imaginative murder mystery that is both a love letter to the greats of classic crime fiction and a brilliant puzzle the likes of which you will never have read before.

All I know is that if ever a book deserved a re-read, this is it. I’m already anticipating how much fun I will have starting the story again but this time armed with the knowledge I’ll need to figure out exactly how immensely clever this work is. Because I’m sure I haven’t recognised the half of it.