Murder on the TV

Cara Hunter has published a series of books about her detective Adam Fawley (see my review here). Those books often tell part of the story in documents and transcripts rather than narrative. In her stand-alone book Murder in the Family the author goes further and tells the whole story in documents such as transcripts of interviews, emails between characters, newspaper cuttings and so on. A lot of the text is transcripts of a seven part TV investigation which looks at an old murder. Obviously this type of storytelling has been done before (see a review here of one recent example I read) but this author does it amazingly well and I found the book very difficult to put down.

Luke Ryder was found dead in the grounds of the home he shared with his wealthy and much older wife. He also had three step children. No one was ever charged with the murder and so a TV company have brought together a group of “experts”, including one of the children, to investigate. Their job is to look at what happened and examine some potential new evidence. By including a member of the family the show is intended to provide new insights into the murder.

The transcripts of the show form the main part of the narrative and these are augmented by emails between the remaining family members, not all of whom are happy about the re-examination of the crime, and between the experts. We also get to see social media posts about the show and evidence from the original investigation. The author makes this all work together to bring us a series of twists and turns until the murderer is revealed. It’s all very clever and I found it compelling reading.