A teasing puzzle-box, this read continually pulls the rug from under your feet. Time-shifting between the 50 doomed days of the Liz Truss era and 1980s Cambridge, the book centres its tricksy path around the murder investigation of a political blogger, genre-switching from cosy crime to dark academia along the way. Rich with wordplay and state-of-the-nation satire, you'll find yourself questioning the truth of this fiction. An ingenious delight.
The body of Christopher Swann was discovered in room 9, on the first floor of Wetherby Hall, at 11.17 on Friday morning by a maid who had noticed blood seeping out from beneath the door. In a frenzied attack, he had been stabbed 11 times with a yanagiba knife, a long, thin-bladed instrument which had been taken from the collection of Japanese utensils on the ground floor. The door of his room had been locked from the inside, and all the windows were also closed and locked on the inside. There was, at first glance, no explanation for how the murderer had made his or her entrance or exit. Despite the violence of the attack, however, there was some evidence that Christopher had remained alive for some time after it was over: because he had somehow managed to drag himself over to the desk, picked up his pen, and scrawled the following message on a piece of notepaper:
"r 8/2"
And so, for the second time during this unfortunate week, the proceedings of the TrueCon conference were interrupted.
