John Parker is a Graduate-qualified English/Spanish Teacher, owner and director of CHAT ENGLISH, an English Language Centre in Avilés on the north coast of Spain . A voracious reader, he has particularly loved horror fiction for many years.
In this, a classic locked room murder mystery, 6 people wake up to find themselves trapped together in a hotel room with no clear idea of how they got there.
The main character is Morgan Sheppard, a daytime television actor. He wakes up and finds himself handcuffed to a bedstead, surrounded by five other people he has never met before. In a short time, it is discovered that there is a dead body in the bath. Sheppard learns that he has just three hours to find the killer who is in the hotel room with them. As Sheppard is the presenter of Resident Detective on TV, it falls to him to solve the murder or all of the people in the room will die. All the people seem to have some connection to the victim. It is up to Sheppard, the former “boy detective” to find out who.
McGeorge’s debut novel is an exciting one. Inevitably, it calls to mind, Agatha Christie’s, “And Then There Were None” or, for more modern types, perhaps the first Saw movie. Whatever, the idea is intriguing and always attractive to a crime buff. Perhaps the novel’s main failing is the unlikable characters. The plot is interesting both in the present day and in the flashbacks. I also imagine that the veterans of this type of fiction will guess the identity of the killer fairly quickly. I confess that I did not, though it seemed obvious to me once revealed.
To recap, had I been more invested in the characters, I would have enjoyed it more. Having said that, it is a decent effort and definitely shows a lot of promise, so let’s see what his next locked room mystery is like (there is a preview at the back of the book for “Now You See Me” and the strap line says “Six people went in. Only one came out.”
I will give it a go.
