The best locked room mysteries

The ultimate locked room mystery.

Not only do we have a killer in an isolated situation (a small island) intent on murdering every one of the ten occupants but we soon find out the killer is one of the ten occupants.

As each is picked off, one-by-one those who remain try desperately to stay alive and to unmask the killer.

This book got me through a difficult time at school. I was the school bully’s target and I let it be known I was reading a book where everyone is murdered, one by one.

This appealed to her macabre personality and so I fed her bits of the book each day until she forgot she didn’t like me. Thanks for that, Agatha! 

During lockdown I was invited to take part in an online event with three other authors, one of whom was Phoebe Morgan.

I read all three authors’ books in preparation and was quickly drawn into The Wild Girls. The locked room in this case is a luxury lodge in Botswana, the cast of characters four friends who have avoided each other for the past couple of years.

And then one of the four invites the others to celebrate her birthday with a trip to Africa, all expenses paid. But when the trio arrives the hostess is nowhere to be seen. Nor are there any staff and the lodge itself is isolated.

And then the promised party becomes a nightmarish fight for survival.  

I was lucky enough to win a copy of The Guest List when I attended a book club where Lucy Foley was speaking about her earlier novel, The Hunting Party.

I asked a question which was judged to be the most interesting (I’ve forgotten what it was!) and the prize was an advance copy of Lucy’s next book.

In The Guest List an island off the coast of Ireland is the setting for a celebrity wedding and we learn early in the book that someone has died.

The trick Lucy Foley pulls off is to conceal the identity of the victim until nearly the end of the book, leaving readers to work out the identities of both murderer and victim. I failed spectacularly at both!

I first met Laura at Theakston’s Crime Writing Festival in Harrogate not long after reading her debut novel, Friend Request and I’ve been a fan of her writing ever since.

And so, when I was offered an advance copy of My Husband’s Killer, I jumped at the chance. Laura does interpersonal relationships brilliantly and I knew I was in for an intriguing read.

The novel opens as the victim’s widow prepares for his funeral, having learned a shocking secret about her husband who drowned off the Amalfi coast.

What she thought had been an accident now looks very different and so we go back in time, gradually filling in the gaps until the truth emerges.

The Institution is a secure unit for the criminally insane, unnerving enough but when the two main characters enter its walls under cover, one as a therapist, the other posing as a patient, the stakes are high.

A horrific crime has taken place and the remote location means the perpetrator was either a patient or a    member of staff. The two lead characters have to find the killer while keeping their real identities a secret.

Add to this a race against time to find a newborn baby and the tension is unbearable.

I wrote about an abducted baby in my second book and keeping the race against time uppermost in the reader’s mind was the most difficult part of the process.