Monday 6 May 2019

Guess Who by Chris McGeorge #NetGalley

Guess Who by Chris McGeorge
Published by Orion Books
Publication Date 3rd May 2018
Genre: mystery, suspense, thriller
416 pages

Book Description:

ONE ROOM. FIVE SUSPECTS.
THREE HOURS TO FIND A KILLER.

GUESS

WHO

A waitress. A cleaner. An actress. A lawyer. A student. Everyone is a suspect.

WHERE

In a locked room - with no escape, and no idea how they got there.

WHAT

In the bathtub, the body of a man they all knew. Someone murdered him. Someone in this room.

WHY

They have three hours to find out. Or they all die.

THE RULES ARE SIMPLE. THE GAME IS NOT

Imagine Agatha Christie had created an interactive Escape the Room game, and GUESS WHO would be the result. For fans of the DI Helen Grace series by MJ Arlidge, The Lucky Ones by Mark Edwards, Ragdoll by Daniel Cole, and From the Dead by Mark Billingham.

My Review:

I'm very late reviewing this book, I do apologise - and it is me who is feeling very sore at not having done so before as I have been missing out on a great book.
The focus of the story is a 39 year old TV celebrity named Morgan Sheppard, someone akin to Jeremy Kyle in my mind as I read the story.  Morgan shot to fame as a young man having hit the headlines as a promising detective following the death of his school teacher. An event which has had him seeing a therapist ever since.  But someone seems to have an issue with his celebrity status. Someone who has gone to extreme lengths to ensure that the public know the truth about Morgan Sheppard.
Morgan finds himself having been abducted, held captive and handcuffed to a hotel room bed. As he stirs, he realises he is not alone in the room however he is the only one in handcuffs.  As the other people come to, they all realise that they have all been drugged and brought to this location: a hotel room in Central London.
He is just trying to work out what is going on when the TV switches on, and a figure appears on screen wearing a horse head mask, explaining that it is up to Morgan to solve another crime; but this time he has a time limit.  There's a body in the bathroom, the suite is locked down so that means that the murderer is one of the people in the room. And if Morgan doesn't work out who killed the man, a bomb will detonate and he will then be to blame for the consequences - and the world will know that Morgan is not the crack detective he purports to be.
I'm not going to review the details of how the crime scene pans out, that would ruin the book for future readers, but there is a lot of soul searching among all the characters who have been brought together in the hotel room.  It's a clever plot for a book and I thoroughly enjoyed trying to work out the whys, hows and whos of the situation.
I definitely recommend it, as the suspense racks up and everyone of the people in the room is a suspect - they all have equal motive and opportunity to be the killer. But how is Morgan supposed to work it out when ultimately all he is is a high profile TV presenter. Someone wants Morgan cut down to size, but with an ego the size he has, will he come clean and admit his shortcomings?
With an easy to read style, Chris McGeorge has a great novel here and I am surprised I haven't seen more about this book since its release. I also think it would work really well as a TV mini series. Buy your copy from Amazon UK

About the Author:

Chris McGeorge is a graduate of MA Creative Writing (Crime/Thriller) from City University London where he wrote debut thriller Guess Who as his thesis. He told stories from an early age, writing and drawing comics and then scripts and finally novels. He loves Golden Age crime and gets incredibly excited about anything a little out of the ordinary. In his spare time, he is an actor with Durham Dramatic Society.

He lives in Durham with his hamster, Agatha Christie.

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