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A random group of people are trapped in a Swiss hotel when most of the world is destroyed in a nuclear war. While everyone struggles to survive and stay more-or-less sane, Jon, an American historian who was there with a conference, keeps a journal and investigates the murder of an unknown child.
The child's body is found inside a locked hotel water tank. The one doctor on the premises does an autopsy with the tools she has available, which doesn't reveal much but does show that she was probably killed around the time when the world got nuked. A lot of people left at that point, so her murderer could no longer be present. But Jon starts doggedly investigating, mostly as a distraction from, well, everything but particularly his probably-dead wife and children back in America, and soon starts getting the impression that someone still present in the hotel doesn't want him to learn the truth.
I saw this on a list of modern mysteries riffing off And Then There Were None, and was intrigued by its premise. I like mysteries in which the usual trappings of detection are either unknown or unavailable.
I had WILDLY mixed feelings about this book. On the plus side, it's extremely page-turning. I read the entire thing before bed, staying up too late to finish it.
It does function as a murder mystery, and a reasonably fair one in that I was able to guess the murderer and several key aspects. (The main thing I missed was the motive.) However, as a murder mystery and particularly as a riff on And Then There Were None, it misses one of the key things that makes the genre enjoyable, and while not technically a cheat is still annoying.
The murderer did in fact leave on the first day, and so none of the actual suspects did it. It's not quite a cheat because this was always a possibility, and in fact I guessed who it was though I thought he was secretly lurking in the hotel rather than having bailed immediately. (I would have MUCH preferred him to be secretly lurking.)
The people trying to impede Jon's investigation are afraid that while investigating in general, he'll discover something totally unrelated that they did. Still annoying.
The post-apocalyptic aspects are pretty well-done. It does not fall into the typical cannibalism rapefest tropes, but is plausibly about a set of devastated, shocked people struggling to survive under very difficult circumstances. It uses modern technology and social media, and how people use it and miss it, very plausibly and well.
What I did not like, apart from the spoiler above:
The main character. He was literally the least interesting person in the entire book. He's such a stereotype of both the main character of a literary novel about a white guy and an example of "he's the main character because he's a white guy."
He's a historian but his actual field is mentioned literally once. He has an affair with the only other American in the hotel, an annoying woman who's clearly a Trump voter though the name Trump isn't used and is obsessed with guns, and gets unsurprisingly defensive when people point out that Unnamed Trump caused the end of the world.
There's a supposedly shocking revelation late in the book that he had a loveless marriage and he and his wife were both cheating, and I literally hadn't realized this was supposed to be a surprise because I'd assumed that all along.
The hotel inhabitants isolate themselves a lot, and Jon isn't friends with the ones who are more social. They never really feel like a society, which is really missing one of the most interesting aspects of the premise. If you read literally any Agatha Christie book with a bunch of strangers stuck in a house, you'll know what everyone thinks of everyone and how they function as a group. This book is missing that.
There's a bunch of eerie/spooky elements that are set up but then nothing comes of them, including...
The hotel is huge and it's repeatedly mentioned that people could be living in it without any of the other residents knowing! Nothing ever comes of this.
One of the characters might be haunted by a creepy little boy! Nothing ever comes of this.
The hotel has been the site of multiple bizarre deaths and a serial killer! Nothing ever comes of this.
And then there's the climax. I actually really liked the climax... right up until the aggravating final page.
All the way through, everyone assumes that all the people who left the hotel are dead, and the cities are a murder-cannibalism rapefest. When they finally venture out of the hotel and into the city (due to hunger and fear of a roving cannibal band), they find that in fact, many of the people who left the hotel are fine, and the city has pulled together and is doing a hell of a lot better than the hotel was.
The internet still exists, and the hotel people can get on it once they get out of their dead zone. Survivors are contacting each other, and Jon discovers that his wife and kids are alive. He decides to try to somehow get back to America with Trump Woman so he can meet up with his children, though his marriage is over.
I liked all this. It was unexpected yet plausible.
AND THEN.
Second-to-last page: His wife emails him not to come. We never see his reaction to this. My reaction is that they're his kids too, the marriage was basically over before the war, and she can't stop him from traveling, so this is not some kind of shocking bombshell.
Last page: Trump Woman adds a note that Jon keeled over from an infected tooth (this was an ongoing thing, so not out of the blue), and maybe he'll die. The end!
Just... why add all that? Why the wife thing if he's going to drop dead anyway? Very cement truck.
Content notes: Things you'd expect given the premise that aren't actually in the book: No nuclear-specific horrors like radiation sickness, as everyone's too far away for that. It does centrally involve child death, but there's no on-page child harm. There's an attempted rape, but it's off-page. Cannibalism is discussed as something that's probably happening elsewhere, but does not appear on-page.
Things that do appear on-page: violence, drugs, and suicide.
The child's body is found inside a locked hotel water tank. The one doctor on the premises does an autopsy with the tools she has available, which doesn't reveal much but does show that she was probably killed around the time when the world got nuked. A lot of people left at that point, so her murderer could no longer be present. But Jon starts doggedly investigating, mostly as a distraction from, well, everything but particularly his probably-dead wife and children back in America, and soon starts getting the impression that someone still present in the hotel doesn't want him to learn the truth.
I saw this on a list of modern mysteries riffing off And Then There Were None, and was intrigued by its premise. I like mysteries in which the usual trappings of detection are either unknown or unavailable.
I had WILDLY mixed feelings about this book. On the plus side, it's extremely page-turning. I read the entire thing before bed, staying up too late to finish it.
It does function as a murder mystery, and a reasonably fair one in that I was able to guess the murderer and several key aspects. (The main thing I missed was the motive.) However, as a murder mystery and particularly as a riff on And Then There Were None, it misses one of the key things that makes the genre enjoyable, and while not technically a cheat is still annoying.
The murderer did in fact leave on the first day, and so none of the actual suspects did it. It's not quite a cheat because this was always a possibility, and in fact I guessed who it was though I thought he was secretly lurking in the hotel rather than having bailed immediately. (I would have MUCH preferred him to be secretly lurking.)
The people trying to impede Jon's investigation are afraid that while investigating in general, he'll discover something totally unrelated that they did. Still annoying.
The post-apocalyptic aspects are pretty well-done. It does not fall into the typical cannibalism rapefest tropes, but is plausibly about a set of devastated, shocked people struggling to survive under very difficult circumstances. It uses modern technology and social media, and how people use it and miss it, very plausibly and well.
What I did not like, apart from the spoiler above:
The main character. He was literally the least interesting person in the entire book. He's such a stereotype of both the main character of a literary novel about a white guy and an example of "he's the main character because he's a white guy."
He's a historian but his actual field is mentioned literally once. He has an affair with the only other American in the hotel, an annoying woman who's clearly a Trump voter though the name Trump isn't used and is obsessed with guns, and gets unsurprisingly defensive when people point out that Unnamed Trump caused the end of the world.
There's a supposedly shocking revelation late in the book that he had a loveless marriage and he and his wife were both cheating, and I literally hadn't realized this was supposed to be a surprise because I'd assumed that all along.
The hotel inhabitants isolate themselves a lot, and Jon isn't friends with the ones who are more social. They never really feel like a society, which is really missing one of the most interesting aspects of the premise. If you read literally any Agatha Christie book with a bunch of strangers stuck in a house, you'll know what everyone thinks of everyone and how they function as a group. This book is missing that.
There's a bunch of eerie/spooky elements that are set up but then nothing comes of them, including...
The hotel is huge and it's repeatedly mentioned that people could be living in it without any of the other residents knowing! Nothing ever comes of this.
One of the characters might be haunted by a creepy little boy! Nothing ever comes of this.
The hotel has been the site of multiple bizarre deaths and a serial killer! Nothing ever comes of this.
And then there's the climax. I actually really liked the climax... right up until the aggravating final page.
All the way through, everyone assumes that all the people who left the hotel are dead, and the cities are a murder-cannibalism rapefest. When they finally venture out of the hotel and into the city (due to hunger and fear of a roving cannibal band), they find that in fact, many of the people who left the hotel are fine, and the city has pulled together and is doing a hell of a lot better than the hotel was.
The internet still exists, and the hotel people can get on it once they get out of their dead zone. Survivors are contacting each other, and Jon discovers that his wife and kids are alive. He decides to try to somehow get back to America with Trump Woman so he can meet up with his children, though his marriage is over.
I liked all this. It was unexpected yet plausible.
AND THEN.
Second-to-last page: His wife emails him not to come. We never see his reaction to this. My reaction is that they're his kids too, the marriage was basically over before the war, and she can't stop him from traveling, so this is not some kind of shocking bombshell.
Last page: Trump Woman adds a note that Jon keeled over from an infected tooth (this was an ongoing thing, so not out of the blue), and maybe he'll die. The end!
Just... why add all that? Why the wife thing if he's going to drop dead anyway? Very cement truck.
Content notes: Things you'd expect given the premise that aren't actually in the book: No nuclear-specific horrors like radiation sickness, as everyone's too far away for that. It does centrally involve child death, but there's no on-page child harm. There's an attempted rape, but it's off-page. Cannibalism is discussed as something that's probably happening elsewhere, but does not appear on-page.
Things that do appear on-page: violence, drugs, and suicide.
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This is one of the buttery parts of ensemble stories, because of course we want to know how each configuration of relationships works. Skipping that misses out on a lot of iddy feels. Strange choice!
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Did you pick this up at Bouchercon? I feel like I remember seeing the cover.
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No, it was briefly on sale on Amazon. The cover is pretty misleading, too.
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I feel like a book that was not this book could have done a lot more with the contrast between the hotel with its creepy history and its current murder and all its suspicious dynamics and the fact that the outside world is actually doing all right for having just been nuked. I really like the inversion of the post-apocalyptic trope that the safest place to be is holed up in the justifiable assumption that venturing out of bounds equals death with or without a side of cannibalism and rape. It just doesn't sound like it was thematically pulled together at all.
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This was immediately undercut by him dropping dead OR IS HE on the next page.
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That is really good! Phooey.
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See, that's great. The rest, bzuh?
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Aside from the cement truck ending, I think I am most bemused by the decision to build up a potentially supernatural atmosphere for the hotel and then do zilch nada with it. Especially, in light of the previous multiple bizarre deaths, the lack of secret lurking.
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...and NONE of it turned out to be relevant!
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Though it sounds extremely frustrating to read!
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I mean, yeah, dental stuff could suck a lot in post-apocalyptic conditions, but what a weird anticlimax for a book. Especially when it sounds like it would have had a very good ending if the last couple of pages had just been cut.
ETA: Any chance the weird stuff on the last two pages was meant to set up suspense/drama for a sequel?
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He'd been delaying having a tooth extracted for most of the book, so it was certainly foreshadowed. But it still felt bizarre.
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Tragically, I don't write the correct sort of fiction to go with that title.
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(The woods had probably-cannibals because they were the people who'd been kicked out of town for being violent assholes.)
I am still boggled by the sheer number of really quite interesting plot threads that were introduced, brought up repeatedly, and then just dropped.
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It was so frustrating! The premise was so good, and then that's what you do with it?
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I always felt that Jon was 100% the sort of mediocre white man protagonist who is usually written by... white men.
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My being disappointed that the city didn't turn out to be Efrafa or Cowslip's Warren is not really the author's fault, but still. I did want it to turn out that way.
ETA, because I meant to say this and then was distracted by Watership Down comparisons: a lot of the book felt like it was written by an author struggling against herself. She has fun, pulpy, iddy ideas - nuclear post-apocalyptic, ghosts, serial killers, cannibals in the woods - but also feels like those ideas are too pulpy and iddy to be acceptable in a book subtitled "A Novel" and so she can't commit to them. It felt very much like watching one of those 1930s horror films where they had to eventually give everything a mundane Scooby Doo explanation in the last five minutes, because the creators thought actual supernatural horror was too silly and immature.
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I agree with your ETA, except it was even worst than everything having a mundane explanation because there was no explanation at all! Why could other people apparently sense Adam's ghost if there was no ghost? Why make a big deal about people hiding in the hotel and then never either confirm or deny?
ARRRRGGGGHHHHH.
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Maybe the big reveal is that his wife is also cheating? But if you're in a loving monogamous marriage, you're probably not going to have an affair with someone else, or you'll be full of racking guilt. Certainly from your description I am all ??? How is this a surprise ???
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If it turned out that his marriage was in trouble because he'd been abusing his children or was a serial killer or something, that would have been legitimately shocking.