Murder in New Zealand

Nalini Singh is best known for her fantasy novels (see my review here) but she has more recently started to write suspense stories (see here and here for previous reviews). There Should Have Been Eight is her latest, which is set in rural New Zealand.

Once there were eight friends but one of them died by suicide, affecting all the others. They gather at a remote Victorian mansion, part destroyed, which had belonged to Bea and her sister – it has plenty of rooms, staircases and doors which help to create mystery in the story. The aim of the weekend is to catch up with one another and celebrate some new relationships but it doesn’t work out that way. The snow begins to fall and they find themselves cut off. Then items start appearing and disappearing. Then someone dies and the others have to work out who to trust.

The premise and setting for this novel work well and the author has effectively created a locked room mystery. The mystery unravels slowly until we reach a clever climax but it is fair to say that I had worked out what was happening before that point – I read a lot of crime novels. I enjoyed what is to me an exotic and unusual setting. The author was good at throwing in some red herrings and making the reader suspect each person in turn.

The problem, however, for me was that there were too many characters, There were the seven gathered in the house plus one additional partner and then there was Bea who was mentioned a lot and whose memory drove the plot. I began to forget which character was which, what their occupation was and who their partner was. I think that I might have been better able to cope had there been fewer characters, although that would have affected the author’s ability to create suspense. I didn’t lose track completely but I didn’t engage and identify with most of the people because I didn’t always remember enough about them and they weren’t sufficiently differentiated in my mind from the others.

Please don’t think that this is a poor novel because it isn’t. It is clever and ultimately satisfying but there was this issue for me which meant that maybe I didn’t enjoy it as much as I could have.