Imagine you wake up in an unfamiliar room with no idea where you are or how you got there. Venturing through the door you discover that you’re locked inside an old country house with nine strangers, none of whom know what’s going on either. Once you’re all gathered in one room, a woman enters and introduces herself as Amanda. She explains that a girl has been abducted and is imprisoned somewhere within the house. Twelve hours from now her oxygen will run out and she’ll die; if you can find her, you’ll save her life and will also find the way out of the house. Amanda has barely finished speaking when she is shot dead. Unless you want to be next, it seems you have no choice but to find the missing girl as soon as possible.

This is what happens to student Kyle Tanner, executive Diana Landor, retired policeman Len Melville, mother and baby Cerys and Monica Herbert, military man Captain Saint, warehouse clerk Sylvia Moult, thief Iain Wardle-Roberts, stripper Ramona O’Rourke and child molester Desmond Blaine. As these ten people begin to search the house for the hidden prisoner, they start to get killed off one by one. Is the murderer one of the ten – or are there other people in the house as well?

This book is being compared to Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were None – and there are some obvious similarities – but it reminded me more of The Seven Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle by Stuart Turton. Like the Turton novel, this one requires the reader to accept an unlikely scenario that feels contrived and implausible, which is something some readers will be happy to do and some won’t. In this case, it does all make perfect sense by the end of the book, but in the meantime you have to be prepared to be patient and just go along with the plot.

The novel is narrated by all ten characters (well, nine – baby Monica only gets a few sentences), with the perspective switching rapidly between them throughout the book. We hardly get to know some of them before they are killed, but the ones who survive further into the book become more developed as characters. None of them are very pleasant people, though, and I can’t say that I really enjoyed being inside any of their minds – particularly not Desmond’s! There’s also another narrator, one who’s known only as The Beast in the Cellar, who interrupts the story now and then to speak directly to the reader, make observations and, I suppose, provide some humour. I found these chapters fun at first, but they quickly started to irritate me.

I was expecting a stronger murder mystery element to the book, so I was surprised to find that the characters don’t actually seem to have much interest in looking for the abducted girl and just wander around the house arguing with each other and wasting time. It’s not really the sort of book that has clues and red herrings and where you can try to work out who the murderer is. The real mystery is the one surrounding the house itself, why the characters have been brought there and why those ten in particular have been chosen. I came up with lots of theories while I was reading, but didn’t come close to the correct answer.

This is definitely a book that needs to be read right to the end to be fully appreciated, then. It was only when the truth was revealed that I understood some of the things that had confused or annoyed me earlier on. It would be interesting to read it again from the beginning, with the knowledge of how it ends, but I’m not going to do that as I have far too many other books waiting to be read! It’s a fascinating book, though, even if it didn’t entirely work for me.

Thanks to Simon & Schuster UK for providing a copy of this book for review via NetGalley.