When Elspeth arrives at her ex-husband's LA mansion for his 50th birthday party, she's expecting a crowd for the British film director. Instead, there are just seven other guests and Richard's pet octopus, Persephone, watching over them from her tank.
Come morning, Richard is dead.
In the weeks that follow, each of the guests come under suspicion: the school friend, the studio producer, the actress, the actor, the new boyfriend, the manager, the cinematographer and the ex-wife, Elspeth herself. As stories of Richard's past surface, colliding with Elspeth's memories of their marriage, she begins to question not just who killed Richard, but why these eight guests were invited, and what sort of man would want to trap this mysterious, intelligent creature.
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['Elspeth' he said]***
(@HodderBooks, 30 April 2020, 304 pages, paperback, #ARC from @AmazonUK #AmazonVine)
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I really wasn't sure what to expect when I read this. I was looking for something original and boy did I get that. I think this is the first book I've read where an animal is a murder suspect. I still can't get my head around that concept. The octopus is actually the only nice character in the book. The humans are all pretty nasty and deserve each other's misery. The main character is a woman attending her ex-husband's 50 th birthday party where one of the guests is his male lover. Nice one! Not awkward at all! You can imagine how uncomfortable the party is. There's a lot of drinking and taking drugs and you can guess how well that ends. The next morning the ex-husband is dead. Who or what killed him? The book is intriguing but as the characters are all pretty nasty I felt no sympathy or empathy for them. It's made clear from the start that Richard, the ex-husband is pretty nasty so I didn't care that he was dead. That's where this book's big flaw lies. I need to get behind a character, even an unpleasant one to invest in them and their story. I couldn't. This is an interesting idea for a murder mystery that didn't work as well as it could have.
