Murder You Wrote: An Interactive Mystery by L.J.M Owen (editor)

Title: Murder You Wrote: An Interactive Mystery

Author: L.J.M Owen (editor)

Genre: Crime

Publisher: Clan Destine Press

Published: 1^st November 2023

Format: Paperback

Pages: 246

Price: $34.95

Synopsis: Murder You Wrote: An Interactive Mystery is a choose-your-own-investigation murder mystery set in remote Tasmania, a world of stunning beauty, dark history, and deadly creatures.

You are a retired police detective invited to speak at a crime fiction writers festival. You are looking forward to a weekend with some of Australia’s bestselling authors.
You’re staying in a convict-built country manor house along with five other guests of the festival. The other guests don’t exactly get along.

You awake to discover the homestead is cut off. Overnight, storms flooded the only road out, the internet is down…and a world-famous writer is missing.

You discover his body in the library. Certain that one of the four remaining guests was responsible for his death, you decide to investigate.

Which suspect will you interrogate first?

Which clues will you follow?

Can you solve the case?

Murder You Wrote features stories by Alison Alexander, Sarah Barrie,
Karen Brooks, Jack Cainery, R.B. Cole, Alan Carter, Natalie Conyer,
Craig Cormick, E.K. Cutting, Livia Day, Jo Dixon, Jacq Ellem, Jason Franks,
Narrelle M. Harris, Carys King, Angela Meyer, Allison Mitchell, David Owen,
L.J.M. Owen, Matthew D. Ruffin, E.V. Scott, Marion Stoneman,
Maggie Veness, Sarah White, and Z.E. Davidson.

~*~

If you enjoyed the choose your own adventure style books as a kid or like to guess the killer when watching or reading other murder mysteries, then this is the book for you. Set at a writer’s festival in Tasmania’s Huon Valley, the star of the story is you, the reader, a retired detective, and aspiring author who is a guest speaker at the festival. But just as things are getting started, the other guests are at each other’s throats. But when you wake up after a stormy night, the homestead has been cut off – flooded roads, no internet, and a dead writer in the library – quite poetic – until you have to interrogate the other guests. Paige, the publisher, Bruce, the nemesis, Jasmine, the wife, and Hudson, the new writer on the scene. You are certain one of them is guilty – but who?

Like all choose your own adventure style books, everyone has the same starting point, and from there, the way your story ends up depends on the choices you make. In this book, you are given three choices at the end of each chapter, with the potential to either read the whole story in order and collect all the clues or take your chance with trying to solve it within ten chapters. In order to review the story as a whole, when I read this to review it I read it in order, to see how each chapter worked and fed into the others. Because each chapter was written by a different author, there were a few different styles, but they all worked well together to tell this story and showcased a diverse range of talent. The story centres you – the reader, drawing you into the story in a way that most crime novels don’t to. By making the reader an active participant in the story, an interactive one, Murder You Wrote invites people to try their hand at solving the case.

And what an interesting and complicated case it is – from ruling out the most obvious things to seeing things as too coincidental or running through the things that keep coming up, and trying to work out which ones are red herrings and which ones are actual clues, this story has it all. As I said before, for the purposes of reviewing I read the entire book, even when I thought I had worked out who the killer was, because I wanted to experience the range of styles and authors in the book and see how it worked with a different author taking a different chapter each which led to a secret hidden chapter at the end. Be prepared to question what you think you know from crime shows as well and to not dismiss anything or anyone and remember that there may also be more to the story – things that happen with no explanation often have an explanation, just not one that we are willing to accept.

Everyone has a motive in this book, and everyone has secrets and a history that informs how they respond and react to what is going on around them. The story has a distinct narrative that drives it – which hints at a sense of collaboration so everyone who contributed, as everyone uses the clues, setting, and characters to great effect, and I really enjoyed reading the story. Unlike a choose your own adventure, where reading the story from cover to cover doesn’t work, in this case, it works to do that or works to jump around – even going back in some cases to revisit clues to check they line up with your case and what you as the detective are finding out. I loved that there were so many options for the murder weapon as well – it showed that any good mystery has a range of options, and I did like the Cluedo feel of it. It also acted as a closed-room mystery where everyone is somehow cut off from the world and technology – something I have noticed quite a bit of these days in contemporary crime fiction as a way to write a crime story that can’t be solved too quickly when technology can solve it in minutes. This is what made it effective – nobody really knew what happened and nobody could just use the internet to solve things. It made the story much more interesting, as did all the crime fiction references littered throughout.

I am looking forward to going back (not immediately perhaps) and reading this but taking a different path to see if I can solve it and come to the same conclusion. It’s pleasant being surprised as well, which shows that these authors have pulled this together brilliantly and effectively, making it work for many readers of crime fiction. Another great book for crime fiction lovers.