im a huge fan of murder mysteries so i loved this one. i loved how meta it was as well as all the twists.

After the initial pages, I found myself not connecting with the story or characters, so I decided to pass on this book. Did not finish

This pains me to write because I was so excited for this one and unfortunately it disappointed me.

On a positive note though, I think this is one of the coolest covers I've seen in a while!

Right off the bat, I was super excited because it was giving me major Everyone In My Family Has Killed Someone vibes (5 star read for me). The narrator seemed very similar to that book, along with breaking the 4th wall, listing rules for murder mysteries, etc. etc.

Unfortunately, this book felt like it was trying too hard to be clever and because of that it felt so "high brow" that I didn't even care/or really understand what was happening with the characters and the plot since it was all focused on the "rules" of a murder mystery.

Overall, not what I expected, but I'd still be willing to read what he writes again in the future. Hoping this will still be a hit for many!

Thanks so much to Knopf for the ARC. This book will be available on October 24th!

I really wanted to like this one, I enjoy meta mysteries, but this one is too precious by half. It is nowhere near as smart as it wants you to think it is, and its conceit drags down the pacing and almost made me DNF.

This was a fascinating story within a story. On one hand there is 1970's themed murder mystery afoot in a secluded private hunting camp with all of the miscreants and harpies you would expect to find. One the other, there is a breaking of the fourth wall type dialogue with the reader regarding the murder mystery genre and some of its most prolific authors. I thoroughly enjoyed the entwined ongoing investigation littered with bits of murder mystery trivia. The only flaw was of my own doing. I was unable to figure out who the murderer was even at the end of the book. I reread the ending over and over and searched the internet for a clue to no avail which just leaves me still thinking about the book into the future when so many stories are ultimately forgettable.

Thank you to NetGalley and The Publisher for the eARC. I struggled with reading this one, the narrative choices were confusing and the format was not for me. It's a very unique mystery and the whodunit and why was intriguing, but unfortunately, I did not enjoy the experience of reading West Heart Kill as much as I hoped to.

I really wanted to love this book, but I didn’t. I couldn’t get into it and had trouble connecting with the story and the characters. It just kept going and I couldn’t wait to be done with this. I’d give West Heart Kill a pass.

I enjoyed the actual mystery itself, the whodunit and whydunit of it all, although I was never able to keep the characters exactly straight in my mind. I didn't care for the changing points of view because I felt like I was back in high school identifying items for a test: first person, second person, limited, and omniscient. Plus the asides and descriptions from the narrator took me out of the story. I found it hard to pick up this book and get dropped into the story. All sorts of examples of mysteries and their parts were explained to us, and many were used in this story. The ending wasn't my cup of tea because it seemed like a slap in the face after putting the time and effort into reading.

Unfortunately, I did not enjoy this book.

The biggest issue for me is the choice of narrative devices the author uses. We are given the actual murder mystery/thriller from the point of view of an unknown narrator as well as injections of commentary on murder mystery tropes and history from the author. Initially, these interjections were just annoying, pulling me out of the story and keeping me from connecting to the characters and what was happening.

As the novel progressed, these interjections became more frequent, and took over the book. I was left with the feeling that the book existed to show how smart the author is (there was clearly a great deal of research done), rather than to tell a story. In the end, both the plot and characters lacked development, as more time was spent with the author's thoughts.

Content warnings: This novel features abuse of women and anti-semitism as plot points, with barely a frown at their occurrence. There is a sense of, well, it was the times, with no suggestion that they were bad. The books does not include racism, but probably only because there were no characters of color.

This reads like a screenplay. I struggled with reading this one. It's a very unique mystery, but unfortunately, I did not enjoy the experience of reading West Heart Kill as much as I wanted to.

"Looking for an anything-but-ordinary whodunit? Welcome to the West Heart country club. Where the drinks are neat but behind closed doors...things can get messy. Where upright citizens are deemed downright boring. Where the only missing piece of the puzzle is you, dear reader.

A unique and irresistible murder mystery set at a remote hunting lodge where everyone is a suspect, including the erratic detective on the scene - a remarkable debut that gleefully upends the rules of the genre.

An isolated hunt club. A raging storm. Three corpses, discovered within four days. A cast of monied, scheming, unfaithful characters.

When private detective Adam McAnnis joins an old college friend for the Bicentennial weekend at the exclusive West Heart club in upstate New York, he finds himself among a set of not-entirely-friendly strangers. Then the body of one of the members is found at the lake's edge; hours later, a major storm hits. By the time power is restored on Sunday, two more people will be dead..."

The question has to be asked, does it really upend the genre?

Thank you to Netgalley and the Publishers for this Advanced Readers Copy of West Heart Kill by Dann McDorman!

West Heart Kill starts by setting the atmosphere, both for the book and for the mystery, and spends a lot of time in dialogue with the reader, describing what a mystery lover feels and why. It's hard to decide whether the asides and tangents are too precious or set just the right sour tone. There are many similarities to Anthony Horowitz's Susan Ryeland and especially Hawthorne and Horowitz books. The mystery at the center is fairly pedestrian, so the novelty must come in the way the "case" is presented, and, for the thoughtful, veteran murder reader, I think it does a respectable and engrossing job.

Beach read. Easy going, nothing complex. I found the characters unrelatable and really didn't feel any strong connection or care what happened.

West Hart Kill features all the staples of a murder mystery: an isolated hunting lodge, a raging storm, a private detective, and a string of puzzling murders. Dann McDorman's book offers much more than the standard mystery novel, however, thanks to its metatextual exploration of the genre.

The book opens like this: "This murder mystery, like all murder mysteries, begins with the evocation of what the reader understands to be its atmosphere." The book constantly calls attention to itself and to its readers, playing with both the expectations of and reactions to stock elements of the mystery genre. The writing is polarizing. Readers will either love or hate the style. I am a fan of texts that are aware of being texts, so I enjoyed the writing style as much as I enjoyed the plot. This was a fun read for mystery fans looking for something completely new!

Thanks to Netgalley and Knopf for gifting me a pre-release copy. Below you'll find my honest review.

I'm really torn on how to rate this one, because it's absolutely unique and brilliant in its own right, but some of that uniqueness turned it sour for me.

I liked the characters - it felt very much like an old-timey, Agatha Christie era murder mystery story. I liked that the characters weren't really all that likeable half the time, even the detective, and I liked that there were a lot of twists in who people really were on the inside.

I liked the mystery - a death, another death, another death, they just kept coming. I liked that one of those deaths was completely and entirely unexpected for me and subverted my expectations.

I liked the unique style choices the author made - at one point, the novel becomes a screenplay, which was a very clever and interesting way to show the scenes.

BUT, all of that being said, the non-stop style choices, the swaps between tenses, the jumping into lessons on the history of mystery writing, the charming-at-first bits about how the reader interacts with the story and has certain assumptions/guesses/etc.... these things all became tedious and distracting. Every few pages, you're pulled out of the story for another aside, and after a while, it just became hard to stay engrossed in the actual mystery.

Couple this with a highly unsatisfying ending, and I just couldn't say I loved it like I wanted to when I started. I still enjoyed the novelty and clever shtick for much of it, so I will give it a solid, yet average, three out of five stars.

I can see this being off-putting for many readers, but I was into the 'deconstruction-lite' playfulness of the story. In that way, it reminded me of mid-century mysteries that tried to do something a little different or unexpected with the usual tropes. The mystery itself wasn't the most satisfying, but I thought the writing was good and it was more than just run-of-the-mill. I'll definitely keep an eye out for what McDorman does next.

My first thought when I started reading this book was that it was going to be really cleverly written. It turned out that that was probably the biggest problem with the book. The author was so busy trying to be clever he forgot he was supposed to be writing a good story about an intriguing mystery with engaging characters. For most of the book I felt like I was in a lecture series with what could have been an enjoyable mystery only referred to in passing. I felt like the author’s main reason for writing the book was to point out how knowledgeable he was about the history of the mystery genre.

Every time the story would begin to pick up some momentum and become the least bit engaging; boom, there would be a totally mood killing break. Do we really need almost a page devoted to defining the word mystery or paragraphs devoted to Dashiel Hammett’s “Flitcraft’s Parable” or the various methods of murder? Besides breaking the already tenuous flow of the story, the unintended result of all these little asides was that it was extremely hard to keep track of the various characters. Of course, if they were to simply be filler, they succeeded admirably because they filled a lot of pages.

The actual murder mystery itself could have been entertaining had it been given more attention. All the elements were certainly there but it seemed the author was more interested in writing an unconventional book than an enjoyable one.

My copy of this book was provided by the publisher via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review. My thanks to the the author, the publisher, and NetGalley for the opportunity to read and review it.

West Heart Kill is a mystery book that feels like it is intended for a very specific type of reader. If you are not that type of reader then it will feel like a convoluted mess that’s difficult to follow and even more difficult to enjoy. Truth be told, I AM the type of reader this type of book appeals to and there were still plenty of points in the book where I felt it got over complicated. The book is both a murder mystery and a reflection on the genre of murder mysteries in general, alternating between the story unfolding and analysis of different tropes. Quite possibly the most dizzying part of the story is the constant switches in perspective. Part is a third person analysis of the genre. Part is spoken to the reader, as they metaphorically look over the shoulder of a detective that’s a guest of one of the families that owns West Heart. Part of it is told directly from the detective’s perspective. Then after a murder (at least in this case, there is no doubt this particular death was accidental) two new perspectives emerge-a first person plural of all the remaining characters, and that of the reader inserting themselves into the story. It’s clever and creative, but may have been easier to follow if it had only used one of these unique approaches. Then of course, it wouldn’t have fulfilled an opportunity to throw the book at the genre. There were some points of this book that reminded me so much of the movie Clue, both in dialogue and the way the plot unfolded, that I couldn’t help but enjoy myself. But I can also see why this would drive other people crazy. This book is not for everyone, but if you like oddball approaches to mysteries and enjoy Clue, you may enjoy West Heart Kill.

Adam McAnnis is visiting the wealthy clubhouse of West Heart thanks to college chum (and founding family scion) James Blake. West Heart has served numerous wealthy families since its inception and seen a high class of guest over those years. Names like Teddy Roosevelt or Charles Lindbergh are on the roster and have stories told about their weekend visits in the club's halcyon days. For an event like the Bicentennial, there are plenty of special events in store as well as a few surprises and even a handful of deaths. Are they natural, self-inflicted, or murder? That's the big question. And Adam is the one with an appreciation for both questions and answers. He's a detective, after all.

West Heart is home to plenty of secrets and rivalries. The children see it as a veritable playground, and so do the adults—though the latter's preference is toward boozing themselves to the gills, maybe indulging a little weed, and seeing how many adulterous acts they can perform. A prospective member is also present, and he might be turned away because of good old antisemitism.

If a crime has been committed, there will be plenty of suspects and it will take a careful investigator to parse out whodunit, howdunit, and whydunit. Is Adam McAnnis up to the task? Or will a Reader alone be forced to identify the clues and assemble them into a significant shape instead? Dann McDorman assembles a book stuffed with clues, blind alleys, locked rooms, dead bodies, hideaways, caches under the floorboards, as well as plenty of facts about and philosophical ruminations on murder mystery fiction with West Heart Kill.

Thirty plus years ago, I attended Oakland University. For those unfamiliar with the name, OU is a smallish university in Rochester, Michigan. There I earned a Bachelor of Science in Physics, a Bachelor of Arts in English Literature, and a Master of Arts in English Literature. Yeah, I'm overeducated, versed in classic and modern fiction, poetry, and drama (as well as quantum mechanics, thermodynamics, differential equations, and a host of other things). I have a love for fiction, both of the literary and genre worlds—I don't see these as high and low art, they are more different expressions with wildly different appeals. Literary fiction is really just another genre, after all. By the way, "Genre" does not come from the word "generic;" both words contain the Latin term gen, but "genre" is the French origin of "genre" and "générique" is the French origin of "generic," the former meaning "a category characterized by a distinctive style, form, or content" and the latter meaning "having no distinctive qualities." Anyone who's telling you otherwise is either misinformed or trying to sell you something. My suggestion? Don't buy. Sometimes, there are crossovers between the schools of literary writing and other genres, of course. If a writer known for genre fiction slums in the realms of literary fiction, well it's often laughed at by the ivory towers, whereas if it's a literary writer "trying to raise up genre," well then it's lauded. Most often writers who are versed in one style of writing don't have the machinery necessary to cross over and the results are uninspired or outright irritating. John Updike writes beautifully in the stories found in Pigeon Feathers, the Rabbit cycle of novels, and The Witches of Eastwick. However, his thriller Terrorist reads like someone who discovered he could actually have fun writing (and did on an early draft) who then made the conscious choice to revise all the fun out so it seems a "more serious" book. Instead of elevating genre, Updike composed a thriller that doesn't thrill, a wannabe literary work that is written down to perceived genre expectations.

It might seem to be a rambling way to get into the novel at hand today, but it's in keeping with Dann McDorman's first novel's spirit. He gives us rambles aplenty as well.

So, here comes West Heart Kill, a book that is ostensibly a mystery novel about people in a cozy setting trying to solve a murder. It's got a detective, clues, interviews. It also has a real sense for the genre—history of topics such as "the howdonit," "the whowroteit," Locked Room mysteries, etc. appear with the regularity of chapters on whaling in Melville's Moby Dick. It breaks the fourth wall with occasional second person narration, and even abandons traditional narrative altogether in its final third for a mode that both pays homage to the mystery plays or yore as well as actualizes the chamber play qualities of that chapter of every Agatha Christie book where Hercule Poirot calls together all the suspects and then covers the crime from top to bottom and throws out his accusations. It offers quotes from a wide variety of literary sources as dialogue.

It's clever. And it's self-conscious about its cleverness, and that can come across as rather tacky. Some will find its tone cynical as hell, appealing to those readers who'd prefer to have their genre narratives served deconstructed atop a bed of rice instead of served neat as a fine aged single malt. I found the novel rather precious, which is among the worst offense any written work can be guilty of.

Is it funny? Yes. Is it smart? Sure. Is it a good read? Well, that depends on who is reading it.

Whenever the thing was rattling along in third person, giving me a glimpse into the lives of the strange folks at this outrageously wealthy locale, I was intrigued to keep the pages turning. When it broke the wall and tried to show me how clever it was being, I tended to roll my eyes. A different reader will have a different response. Many readers of traditional narrative will hate this. Many readers with a love for experimental narrative will enjoy it. A portion or each camp will have the opposite reaction to the rest. And folks who want a mystery that doesn't cheat (as the text itself declares to be the worst kind of fraud) will probably be disappointed with the book. Spoiler alert: West Heart Kill doesn't cheat, but it doesn't play completely fair either. When listening to a con artist, one has to pay particular attention to the words they say, and not our interpretation of them in order to be able to hold them liable for their actions.

Needless to say, this is a book that will be divisive in its readership.

One of the real challenges readers have with second person is taking all this "you" nonsense personal. In fact, a novel is not like a live theater show or stand up comedy performance. It cannot read the room and figure out who is being talked to, the reactions coming back, and make fine tune adjustments for a personalized experience. So when an author is writing to You or to The Reader, this is yet one more character that we the actual reader are invited to play. It can be off-putting to have a text try to tell you what you're thinking or how you're feeling about a variety of topics. People who have zero experience with tabletop RPGs or Choose Your Own Adventures have quite the hurtle to get over to figure out what the hell the book is trying to do. There's a knee jerk response to say, "No I don't/won't." But it's just another character. And in the latter half of West Heart Kill this fact is made all the more explicit when the narrative shifts into a stage play with a character named Reader who is specified to be A Woman with wardrobes that match the audience (in Act I) and the characters (in Act II). Isn't that precious?

In the final analysis, I did not quit reading West Heart Kill. And when I was done, I did not hurl the thing against the wall—such an action would only have broken my Kindle or dented the drywall. I did decide then and there that my earliest instincts had been accurate. Just as the car delivers detective and friend to the cozily isolated location, I got the inkling that this was not going to be a book for me. Still, my physics background recommends that every hypothesis must be tested if it's to be disproved, so on I read all the way to the end. There are moments of beauty in the book, and some wonderful passages showing solid research (or believable fakery) on a variety of non-fiction topics. But West Heart Kill just left me rolling my eyes far more often than makes for an enjoyable reading experience.
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Thank you to Alfred A. Knopf and NetGalley for the opportunity to read an eARC in exchange for an honest review.