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It’s Halloween night, Nana’s 80th��birthday, and she summons her children and grandchildren to her house, a crumbling Victorian on a tiny remote Cornish island. Based on a fortune teller's prediction some years ago, it may be her last birthday.
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To say Nana is eccentric would be an understatement. And the rest of the family? Let‘s just say they put the fun in dysFUNctional, if you love dysfunctional families as much as I do. Their dialogue is often hilarious and they do not hesitate to go after each other with their claws out.��
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Nana reads them her will at dinner. Predictably, not everyone is happy, and the evening ends on a sour note. When the clocks (all 80 of them) strike midnight, everyone is awakened by a scream and someone is found dead. There is a poem written on the chalkboard in the kitchen that predicts each guest’s demise and explains why they deserve to die.
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Each hour on the hour, someone else is found dead. There are other strange elements at play but I won’t ruin the fun. With a nod to Agatha Christie’s AND THEN THERE WERE NONE, this was a fresh new take on a locked door mystery, one that is oozing with atmosphere and menace.
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This was truly unputdownable. It’s often difficult to pinpoint why I fall in love with some books and not others, but this one had everything…Daisy, the narrator, who literally has a “broken heart��, the family secrets, the writing, the creepy old house, eccentric characters, the menace of the tide coming in to trap the occupants in the house for hours, the deaths every hour, the alternating timeline between the past and present��.and all on Halloween night.
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And that ending! The potential suspects are naturally limited and it was fun for Marialyce, my reading buddy, and I to speculate. But there were still a couple of surprises that blew us away. In the hands of a lesser author, I might have rolled my eyes but I found it clever and brilliant! The bread crumbs were there, but I missed them.
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Stephanie Racine narrated the audiobook and her narration was phenomenal. I had both the print and audio versions, and I found I preferred the audio.������I highly recommend listening to this one as she delivered a top-notch performance which made the book even more eerie.