Tuesday Mooney loves a puzzle. So when an eccentric billionaire drops dead, leaving behind a fiendish treasure hunt - open to anyone - to his fortune, Tuesday can't resist.
Although she works best alone, she soon finds herself partnering up with best friend Dex (money manager by day, karaoke-zealot by night) and the mysterious Nathaniel Arches, eldest son of a wealthy family who held a long-running feud with the dead man.
As the clues are solved, excitement across the city reaches fever pitch - but nothing is as it seems, and the puzzle-within-a-puzzle holds something much darker than a vast fortune at its heart...
***
[The Tillerman House was dead]***
(HarperCollins, 1 October 2019, 425 pages, ebook, ARC from @HarperCollinsUK via # NetGalley and voluntarily reviewed)
***
***
Oh boy, did this book disappoint me. I thought this would be a good, old fashioned horror yarn. The blurb intrigued me. Unfortunately, this is not what I expected at all. This is more of a campy, cheesy horror book than anything else. I don't rate those sorts of books highly, unfortunately. The first clue is that the dead billionaire is called Vincent Pryce. Oh, dear! The book tries so hard to be many things and fails at most of them and ends up being a bit of a mess with too much crammed into it. The kids doing the scavenger hunt have no real substance. The spooky mansion is about as far from spooky and scary as you can get. The ending is ludicrous nonsense. There's just so much going on. I couldn't be bothered keeping up with it and when I made an attempt to I got a migraine. Not so good! I also hated the main character Tuesday Mooney with her stupid name! She veers between smart and dumb and is never more than flat and bland. There's a lot of crass humour in the book shoehorned with attempts at seriousness that fall flat. There is also a ridiculous amount of characters, most of which are unnecessary and none are more than chalk outlines.
