Mystery Book Club 2024
Who among us has been lucky enough to never have had an annoying manager or an irritating coworker? You know, that person of whom you say, “If I could chip him/her off a bridge when no one was looking, I'd do it.” Rupert Holmes takes this idea and runs with it, creating the extravagant McMasters Conservatory of the Arts. The deadly arts that is.
So you’ve decided to commit a murder.
Congratulations. Simply by purchasing this volume, you’ve already taken the all-important first step toward a successful homicide of which you can be proud, one that would gain you the admiration of your peers, were they ever to learn of it.
This book will see to it that they don’t.
We are introduced to three McMasters students from wildly different circumstances and get to follow their education and plans to “delete" those who stand in their way at work. Holmes writes with his tongue planted firmly in his cheek. After a couple of chapters of this arch approach, I was starting to weary of it and thus was relieved when he relaxed that conceit (although never truly abandoning it) and got into the convoluted planning of these three deletions. And he writes convolutions with the best of them. It is a pleasure to watch these graduates attempt to finish their theses.
Mr. Holmes obviously has a lively sense of humour and a twisty mind! I would dearly love to know how long he spent dreaming up this novel and writing it. Did it happen in a hurry or did it percolate in his brain for years before he poured it out on the page? I suppose I shall never know, but speculating is great fun.
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