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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.
From:
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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.