Pursuit isn't trivial but deadly serious in Janice Hallett's dazzling procedural, The Killer Question. The intricately woven plot is cleverly dispensed with a jaw-dropping amount of text messages, e-mails, and investigatory depositions.
Dominic Eastwood pitches an "explosive" true-crime documentary to Netflix producer Polly Baker about events that happened to his aunt and uncle, Sue and Mal Eastwood. The case has it all: "love, passion, intrigue, tension, betrayal, deception and... murder." It also has more twists than a spiral staircase.
From December 2017 to October 2019, the Eastwoods owned a "picture-perfect, chocolate-box" pub called The Case is Altered in the backroads of Hertfordshire, northwest of London. There, they ran a highly competitive Monday night quiz game. The pub ran smoothly until the proverbial fly appeared in the amber pints. Mal brawled with a nefarious newcomer; a trivia team may have been cheating; a body was found in the nearby river.
Sorting out who's who, what's what, and why's why makes for an entertaining and engaging reading experience. A large part of that is figuring out Dominic's part in it--how much he knows, and why he proposes the story at all for the documentary project.
A cheeky police subplot, Operation Honeyguide, adds kidnapping, drug running, and more corpses before Hallett (The Examiner) pulls out all the startling stops for a mind-boggling and wholly unexpected conclusion. The Killer Question gets a perfect score. --Robert Allen Papinchak, freelance book critic