Title: West Heart Kill
Author: Dann McDorman
Pages: 288
Publication Date: Oct. 24, 2023
Source: NetGalley
GoodReads Description: Welcome to the West Heart country club. Where the drinks are neat but behind closed doors . . . things can get messy. Where upright citizens are deemed downright boring. Where the only missing piece of the puzzle is you, dear reader.
A unique and irresistible murder mystery set at a remote hunting lodge where everyone is a suspect, including the erratic detective on the scene — a remarkable debut that gleefully upends the rules of the genre.
An isolated hunt club. A raging storm. Three corpses, discovered within four days. A cast of monied, scheming, unfaithful characters.
When private detective Adam McAnnis joins an old college friend for the Bicentennial weekend at the exclusive West Heart club in upstate New York, he finds himself among a set of not-entirely-friendly strangers. Then the body of one of the members is found at the lake’s edge; hours later, a major storm hits. By the time power is restored on Sunday, two more people will be dead . . .
My Review:
If you are a fan of detective mysteries, this book is for you. Not just because it is a detective mystery, but because it spends a great deal of time exploring the genre.
West Heart Kill is a standalone detective murder mystery novel by Dann McDorman in the vein of the locked room mystery. The thing that made this a 5-star read for me was the atmosphere and the interesting narration.
Adam McAnnis is a private detective who has reunited with a college friend and joined him on his 4th of July weekend family vacation. They are going to the West Heart Hunting Club in New England, where several other monied families are members. The 4th of July weekend is a tradition passed down through generations. But is a nice vacation all Detective McAnnis has in mind? It seems McAnnis has been hired by somebody at West Heart, though we don't know who or why. The families in attendance are all pretty dysfunctional. There are affairs, drug use, shady business dealings... All in all, it was great fun.
The atmosphere of the novel is kind of dark and moody, the characters are all deeply flawed, broken, and jaded. I loved the setting and time period. The narration was interesting because the omniscient 3rd person narrator spoke directly to the reader and would intermittently speak to the detective genre and the process of writing a detective novel. Book nerd that I am, I enjoyed his asides immensely. I was left with some questions at the end of it, but the mood of the book trumps that for me, it was a solid 5-star read.
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