Note: This copy of Seven Reasons To Murder Your Dinner Guests was provided by NetGalley.

K.J. Whittle’s Seven Reasons To Murder Your Dinner Guests may have an innocuous and innocent looking cover; it is anything but. The story of how seven seemingly random strangers are invited to a dinner where they are provided with a card detailing the age at which they will die, starts off and remains, fairly grim through the course of the story. What seemed like it would be a cosy murder-mystery when I picked it up ended up being a rollercoaster of a story shining a light on the darkness that lurks in all of us.

The story is easy enough to follow despite its somber tones and the whole time my mental image of the events always had a very drab grey look to them. There was very little positivity radiating from the characters, which makes sense considering they were all told when they would be dying. While assuming it to be a practical joke in the beginning, it soon began to take a worrying turn when people started turning up dead according to the mysterious predictions. The characters are diverse enough with a healthy unlikeable quality to most of them which I suppose was the point of them being marked for death.

The story looks at whether having the knowledge of when a person would die would have any influence on how they would live the remainder of their life. We have a look at the lives of the seven guests and get an insight into the demons they all hide as they are constantly brought together by the deaths of their now comrades, to find the person behind the deaths. While it becomes a little obvious who the culprit very likely is early on, the motivation for the same is one that is only revealed at the end of the book. Unfortunately, I’m not a fan of books which don’t divulge information saving it for a grand reveal in the end thereby not allowing us, the readers, to try and solve the case ourselves, but this seems to be the trend in the murder-mystery space of late.

Consistent pacing, semi-interesting characters, grimmer than expected plot points, a fairly decent read overall. I’m not sure it is a murder mystery I’d recommend when the genre is saturated with so many books, and ones which have a lot more going for them. But not a bad read either and seems like a perfect one-time airport read.

Links:

• Goodreads: Seven Reasons to Murder Your Dinner Guests – K.J. Whittle