West Heart Kill: A novel

I didn't care for the writing style.

Thanks to Libro.fm and the publisher for the alc!

I am all for subverting the mystery genre and doing something fun or weird with it. There were parts of this book that I really enjoyed, and I thought the narrator did an admirable job with all the switching around of formats (2nd person, 1st person, script?). As a whole, it almost seemed like the author was writing a thesis about the history of the genre, and then kind of made up some story as a vehicle for all the research they did? This style took me out of the story so often that I no longer really cared about the characters/plot. If you want to get outside of the box with your mystery without turning the whole thing into an essay, see Stuart Turton, Anthony Horowitz, or Benjamin Stevenson.

The book was a let-down based on the summary that I read and seeing the cover. I didn't like the world building of the book and the writing felt obnoxious to me. I stopped after around 77 pages.

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!