Synopsis:

A Hitchcock fanatic with an agenda invites old friends for a weekend stay at his secluded themed hotel in this fiendishly clever, suspenseful new novel.

Alfred Smettle is not your average Hitchcock fan. He is the founder, owner, and manager of The Hitchcock Hotel, a sprawling Victorian house in the White Mountains dedicated to the Master of Suspense. There, Alfred offers his guests round-the-clock film screenings, movie props and memorabilia in every room, plus an aviary with fifty crows.

To celebrate the hotel’s first anniversary, he invites his former best friends from his college Film Club for a reunion. He hasn’t spoken to any of them in sixteen years, not after what happened.

But who better than them to appreciate Alfred’s creation? And to help him finish it.

After all, no Hitchcock set is complete without a body.

Rating:

Review:

I cannot begin to tell you how disappointed I am about this book. I went into this book with high expectations. After I thoroughly enjoyed Darling Rose Gold by Stephanie Wrobel (review found here), I was really excited to read this one. Once I reached the end however it was….meh. I can’t say anything too great about it. Nor can I saw anything too bad about it. It was just mediocre.

The idea of the hotel was a great once. I am a fan of Hitchcock and so the ambiance and reference to his films was perfect. I loved the setting. It felt like a Hitchcock film. The characters were very Hithcockian, the setting, the plot, the intrigue. It was all lining up to be an absolute joy to read!

The setup to the murder and the beginning of the reveal of the story was wonderfully done too. I found myself sitting on the edge of my seat to see where things went after the great set up. Unfortunately that’s also where this story took a downturn for me.

Alfred does so much monologuing. So much. He monologues to us as the audience, he monologues to his friends, he monologues to the housekeeper. Honestly, at a certain point I had decided that whatever his former friends did to him in college was probably deserved. He was just insufferable after awhile. But, his former friends weren’t much better. They were equally as unsufferable. But, unlike with the author’s previous book, these were not bad people that you could feel a bit of sympathy for. They were just bad people. And then I was certain that whatever Alfred did to them was entirely deserved also. This entire story was a story of insufferable people getting what’s coming to them.

After the initial set up of the mystery, things got a bit too predictable in my opinion. It wasn’t hard to figure out what was going on, the only question was who the culprit was. And once the villain was revealed I expected some fireworks, a grand finale, a final ah-ha! But alas, the villain monologued too. The entire last quarter of the book was one big monologue. And it was so desperately boring.

I liked Darling Rose Gold enough to give Stephanie Wrobel a shot in the future, but this one was a miss. And I couldn’t be more upset that it was. I really wanted this one to be a home run.