She Treads Softly: The Killer Question

Friday, September 12, 2025

The Killer Question

The Killer Question by Janice Hallett
9/23/25; 448 pages
Atria Books

The Killer Question by Janice Hallett is a highly recommended mystery that largely centers on a pub's weekly trivia night while the narrative is told in an epistolary style through a series of email, texts, recorded conversations, etc., and quiz night statistics.

Dominic Eastwood pitches a documentary idea through email for a Netflix documentary about his aunt and uncle Sue and Mal Eastwood. Sue and Mal ran a rural pub called The Case is Altered and had a weekly trivia game on Monday nights. Mal carefully writes the quiz questions and they have teams of regular customers who enjoy the weekly competition. The team called the Plucky Losers are always the expected winners, but everyone enjoys themselves.

It is going swimmingly. Then the body of a known quiz cheater who has been thrown out or banned from several pubs, including The Case is Altered a few weeks earlier, is found in the nearby river. Soon a new team called the Shadow Knights shows up and begin to win with almost perfect scores, upsetting the regulars. It also comes out that Sue and Mal previously served in the police department.

Readers will know that something big is going to happen because Dominic is pitching a documentary and the pub closed five years earlier. He is promising a story full of surprises and twists, which are delivered repeatedly. The well-planned plot delivers on the twists, surprises, and mysteries, especially later in the narrative. There are a large number of characters to sort out, which takes some time at first and slows down the pace. The last third of the novel really increased my rating.

The biggest drawback for me in this novel was the epistolary format with all the text messages, etc. I have enjoyed several novels with this format in the past, but for some reason it didn't work as well for me this time. Admittedly, it may be the presentation in my ARC and the final book may flow smoother.

The Killer Question is a great choice for those who enjoy mysteries, the epistolary style, and pub quiz nights. Thanks to Atria Books for providing me with an advance reader's copy via Edelweiss. My review is voluntary and expresses my honest opinion.

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John Updike's six rules for reviewing:

1. Try to understand what the author wished to do, and do not blame him for not achieving what he did not attempt.

2. Give him enough direct quotation--at least one extended passage--of the book's prose so the review's reader can form his own impression, can get his own taste.

3. Confirm your description of the book with quotation from the book, if only phrase-long, rather than proceeding by fuzzy precis.

4. Go easy on plot summary, and do not give away the ending.

5. If the book is judged deficient, cite a successful example along the same lines, from the author's oeuvre or elsewhere. Try to understand the failure. Sure it's his and not yours?

To these concrete five might be added a vaguer sixth, having to do with maintaining a chemical purity in the reaction between product and appraiser.....Review the book, not the reputation.... Better to praise and share than blame and ban. The communion between reviewer and his public is based upon the presumption of certain possible joys in reading, and all our discriminations should curve toward that end.