Adam Colclough lives and works in the West Midlands, he writes regularly for a number of websites, one day he will get round to writing a book for someone else to review.
In the seaside town of Hamlet Wick nine guests gather for a New Year’s Eve party at which one of the entertainments is to be a murder game. Only murder is never a game, before long they have a real body on their hands, and one of the eight remaining guests could be the killer.
If this sounds like the set-up for a golden age murder mystery it is no accident because that is what Tom Hindle has delivered. What this isn’t though it a simple run through of tiredly familiar tropes, he neatly updates the genre for the twenty-first century.
In doing so he keeps the best aspect, the setting and solving of a satisfyingly complicated puzzle. Adding to it a sensitivity to the emotional lives and back stories of his characters that makes them more than pegs on which to hang clues or red herrings.
Unsurprisingly The Murder Game attracts comparisons with the work of Agatha Christie and passes this pretty stiff test with flying colours. Not least because like the grand dame herself Tom Hindle understands there is no such thing as a ‘cozy’ crime story. Whether set on the mean streets of a big city or among the winding lanes of the countryside the story is always one about the rivalries and personal hurts that drive individuals to murder.
This is Tom Hindle’s second novel, although his writing style is assured enough for it to be his fourth or fifth at least. Suggesting that he has the potential to become a major new voice in British crime writing.
