Customer Reviews

Nine Man's Murder

5 star:		(5)
4 star:		(6)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

As a fan of Agatha Christie's classic And Then There Were None (one of my favorite books of all time), I just had to get this book as soon as I heard about it. Similar set up where a group of people end up in one place and then before you know it, they start dying in mysterious ways. Well, since they are in a stranded location you know it has to be one of them, but WHO? Since a good number of the killings take place in locked rooms, the mystery just grows and grows.

I have to say, I could not put this book down. It is like watching a train wreck, but in a good way. Who's the next person to get knocked off? Why? And then it happens, and you are still surprised, and it's not the person you think it's going to be. It would make a great movie!

One really fun part of the book is that the typography helps you keep track of how many people are left alive as the countdown continues. I thought that was pretty clever and fun.

I completely recommend the book for a fun, suspenseful read. I think Agatha would be proud. P.S. Be sure to use the floor plans at the start of the book, they are really helpful.

In Eric Keith's NINE MAN'S MURDER, a bunch of people who graduated from a detective training agency 15 years earlier are called to their mentor's vacation home for what they assume is a reunion. As they arrive at the train station to prepare for the next leg of their journey up the mountaintop, you realize that these classmates are just like the graduating class of any high school or college. Back then there were rivalries and romances, love triangles, misunderstandings, inferiority and superiority complexes. I loved the way Keith has them all sort of dance around one another, keeping things "cool" on the surface while they're all dreading the reunion while at the same time having their own agendas for attending.

When they arrive, their host is nowhere to be found - and shortly thereafter the 'game' is announced. They'll be killed off one at a time until these certified detectives prove their mettle. What's interesting is - very few of them actually did follow private detection as a career (we have a D.A., a defrocked priest, a bodyguard for the Mob, a psych ward nurse, and so on) so their skills are a little rusty, needless to say! And then the murders start.

I guess it is a common enough set up, but what I LOVED about this book is the way that none of the characters do anything stupid. I mean, in those dumb movies and books, you often have some doofus investigating scary phenomena alone in the dark as if she is invincible, like Tippi Hedren opening that attic door in The Birds (duh). All of these characters have secrets, some quite dark,and good reasons for keeping them. The murders happen as they are being vigilant and purposely NOT doing anything stupid that would expose them to more danger. Which makes the plot all the more intense and suspenseful. It just gets better and better, and when the bodies start to fall I really couldn't put the book down.

A big thumbs up for this one. Plot is great, characters well motivated (not an INTENSE character study, just a focus on two of the core characters, so if you are looking for a quick-tongued heroine or a divorced cop with alcohol problems, it's not for you!), and it made me not want to put it down which is the best endorsement I can give. Also, it's absolutely a great book to share with younger (teenage) readers, as it's not weighted down with profanity or adult situations. I've already shared it with my oldest (19) who shares my enthusiasm.

This review is provided by Susan Ravagni, author of I'm Just a Girl and reviewer for BookPleasures.

Eric Keith's Nine Man's Murder is a bold attempt at duplicating Agatha Christie's mystery, And Then There Were None (also called Ten Little Indians in the movie version).

Did he live up to the attempt? Synopsis and critique below.

Nine people are invited for a reunion at the isolated vacation home of their mentor, Damien Anderson. They are all part of the graduating class 15 years ago from Damien's detective training school.

When the guests arrive, Damien is not there. Only later do they discover his body, a sinister note, and their exit from the retreat (a bridge) is blown up. The note is taunting their abilities as investigators and explains that they are all going to be murdered one by one.

After searching the grounds and determining that the invited graduates are indeed the only inhabitants at the retreat, they work to solve the mystery. When the first of their classmates dies, they become increasingly concerned and suspicious of each other.

Each person has reasons to be a suspect. Secrets revealed, past love affairs gone wrong, dissolved business partnerships, jealousy, and resentments abound. Gideon Lane blames his classmates for the accident that left him wheelchair-bound. Reeve Argyle and Amanda Farrell are former lovers. Bryan West and Jonas Cruz had a detective agency together. Each grudge, each secret is tantalizingly inserted right at a point when you think you have it all figured out.

Integral to the story are a few subplots. 15 years ago the graduates were given a mystery to solve: what caused the tragic accident at a theatre set - the name of the play was Nine Man's Morris. Another subplot deals with mobster Antonio Capaldi: some are working on putting him behind bars and some have a `relationship' (wink, wink) with him. Do either of these situations factor into the stranded classmates' current plight?

One by one the classmates are picked off in one form or another. If you know Christie's And Then There Were None, you will anticipate that one of the victims isn't really dead. But who might that be? When another person is murdered, more than one person always inspects the body. It doesn't seem likely that anyone is fooled or in cahoots. In the end, one of the nine is left standing. But he is not the culprit. Suddenly there are two. Now three are still alive. Incredible! The complete story unfolds and the pieces all fit together. I dare you to figure it out ahead of time.

In one way it was a shame that I had read Christie's book. She was such a genius at building tension and creating mysteries. In her book, a note was left after every murder. It would contain a line from the nursery rhyme Ten Little Indians. For instance the first one was:

Ten little Indians went out to dine;

One choked his little self and then there were nine.

That person was poisoned to death. To make it even more sinister, a figurine, ten in all, that was placed on the dining room table would go missing. As each person died, another note was discovered and another figurine removed. There was something so diabolically malevolent about that, that you were almost afraid to think of the next line of the poem.

So while I loved Nine Man's Murder - the pacing was excellent, the character development well done - I did not see the mounting drama and tension that I was expecting since I couldn't help but equate Keith's book to Christie's. Also, I thought the people were a little too calm and collected, especially as the body continued to stack up. A normal person would be near hysteria (at least I would be).

The ending was great, though. I had kind of pegged one particular person as the murderer but couldn't figure out how they did it. The twist was masterful. Bravo!

I would recommend this book, even if you are a Christie fan or maybe because you are.

What an enjoyable read! Other reviews have commented on the book's "homage" to the Christie Classic, so I won't dwell on that here. What I will say, though, is that I forgot how suspenseful crime novels can be when they are well crafted. Nine Man's Murder starts with the unexpected in the first two pages - a detective pulls out a gun at a train station and shoots his former business partner point blank - and twists and turns from there as a class reunion brings the graduates of a Detective Training School to an isolated inn for an impromptu class reunion. Even as old rivalries and jealousies emerge, the host disappears and "The Game" is announced via anonymous note: The guests will be killed, one by one, until one of them proves themselves worthy of finding the killer and solving the game.

Think James Patterson meets Agatha Christie: Patterson's many brief chapters, with each one usually ending with a cliffhanger, meets Christie's way of planting clues and a very clever way of resolving the whole case, quite different from that in Ten Little Indians. I think this is a pretty tough trick to execute, writing a book in the tradition of the "old school" mysteries that is so admiring of Christie, while also introducing enough modern elements to keep it feeling fresh. I raced through the book in a couple of sittings and loved having Keith pull the wool over my eyes, which he did time and again. Fun, traditional in a good way, fast paced, and just plain enjoyable, especially if you like to match wits with the author.

First note about the Amazon star system: According to the little box, 4 stars means "I like it." To be fair, in that system this book should get 4 1/2 stars, because I liked it very much. But half stars aren't allowed.

NINE MAN'S MURDER is old-fashioned in a good way, what my father used to call a "murder mystery" (I guess that term is considered redundant these days). It has a large cast of characters, each sketched in just enough detail to hint that he or she is harboring secrets and resentments. Like the old-fashioned books, this one starts with a list of characters and floor plans, which made it clear (at least to me) that I was really going to have to pay attention to figure this one out.

But I was not able to pay attention, and I mean that as a compliment to the author. Once the plot really kicks into gear, it moves so fast that it's easy to overlook the clues that are rather marvelously and subtly planted. Occasionally I wanted to force myself to slow down to try to think things through, but it was more fun to keep moving, waiting for the next body to fall and puzzling out how it happened. After 4 or 5 seemingly impossible crimes, I came "this close" to reading the last chapter because I couldn't take the suspense anymore. But I held myself back and I was glad I did, partly because the ending was a humdinger and partly because I wouldn't have been able to look at myself in the mirror if I had cheated!

I've ready some really dull stuff lately (if you need Sominex, try THE LAND OF PAINTED CAVES) so it was a pleasure to spend some time with a cleverly plotted, well told mystery. It has the added bonus of being truly mysterious, unlike a lot of books I've read lately, where crimes seem to get solved magically, through feminine intuition or gut-level hunches.

Eric Keith has crafted a 'who-dunnit' like none other. Nine Man's Murder is a character filled story, which are my favorites that delivers on every single page. A Reader's delight. This will keep you glued to the text until the last page. A triumph in Authorship. I'll be looking for much more of this Author.

If you like to try and guess whodunnit...don't read Eric Keith's hair-raising twist of a puzzle. I practically promise that you won't. In fact, if you do read it and guess, please email me and tell me how you did it. This is the best locked-room mystery I've ever read, not least because the locked room is actually a mountaintop whose passage off I can still see in my mind. It's not pretty. But thanks to the prose in this book, it is very vivid. And oh is it a lot of fun when that way out is eliminated. Mr. Keith has a stark, spare style that shines a light on the clues he very fairly plants all along the way.

You still won't guess.

But you'll have a grand time trying.

Book Club Review

Nine Man's Murder

Eric Keith

Our book club's book for April was NINE MAN'S MURDER by Eric Keith. With all the talk of Golden Age mysteries (they are coming back into style?) we thought we'd go for one, but then a bunch of us had heard about this book, which is a sort of homage to the more traditional mystery novel. And some of us had recently gotten ebook readers (Kindle, Nook) - if you consider Christmas recent! - so we have been talking about trying a book that is available in multiple formats to see if part of our conversation could be about the differences between reading on a page versus on a screen.

The book's setup is almost cinematic. One by one, a group of graduates of a detective training school show up at a mountain train station, having been summoned there by their teacher and mentor Damien Anderson. A class reunion of sorts is promised, 15 years after graduation, and it turns out to be a singularly bad idea! We find out why quite early in the book, so this isn't a spoiler: Damien is dead in a closet at his isolated vacation home. The caretakers who've dropped the visitors at the manor for the weekend won't be back until Monday - and the visitors are stranded with one another, doing their best not to let the past interfere too much with the present. But how do you avoid conflict when two former best friends have to confront each other's business ethics, one woman gives up a child for adoption so that she can progress in her career, a professional DA uses a romantic liaison with a mob guard to get information to bring the capo down, and a priest in a wheelchair is carrying a grudge against the person who crippled him? Pretty soon the sparks start to fly, and the stresses get much worse when "The Game" is announced - the visitors will be killed, one by one, (Agatha Christie style) until they can figure out who's behind it all.

The group gave an enthusiastic thumbs up to the book. It is hard not to be reminded of TEN LITTLE INDIANS in terms of the set up but the resolution is quite different, as are the motivations and the players. We felt our pulses pounding as we watched the bodies fall and drove ourselves a little crazy trying to figure it out. Of the twelve of us, 2 figured out the solution/murderer, while the remainder were stumped. So either Eric Keith is a really good plotter or those two are just smarter than the rest of us! Seriously, though, the clues are planted fairly - they seem so obvious when the truth is revealed that you can't help but feel that "a-ha!" moment. As the game is set up, the book is mostly introduction to the characters and their secrets and conflicts, but that's over in the first 25 pages or so - and then you start getting to the real meat of the book, and it's off like a shot.

One thing we liked was the variety of the characters, including some strong women who don't run around screaming their heads off when they feel threatened. (Actually, the hysteric here is a pseudo-occultist named Hatter Cates, which has to be a pun since the guy is "mad as a hatter" - he's the character you love to hate and want to see as the next victim....) Another admirable thing is the way this group doesn't behave like a bunch of stupid teenagers when they realize what's going on. As professionals they try to work out what is going on, try to figure out how these murders are taking place in locked rooms, and continuously debate with one another regarding whether they are safer in a group or alone. That gives the book a sort of "believability" among the plot, which of course requires much suspension of disbelief. But in a way isn't that what a good novel is all about - making you forget it's fiction?

I suppose the one criticism is - Is the plot or set up TOO similar to Christie's? We debated that a bit and decided that it is different enough in many ways to make it stand as its own book. That got us to thinking about plots in general, and how so many of them are so similar, etc., that we ultimately decided "it's not the plot, it's the execution."

As for reading book vs. Kindle - what can I say? The book people loved the printed book (which has some typographical features that actually add to the suspense, in terms of ticking off the number of dead bodies, or number of people left alive) while the Kindle people loved the ability to make the type larger and therefore more readable. The floor plans at the front of the book are a bit small on the Kindle but that is more a limitation of the technology, I guess. One Kindle reader did use it to take notes and keep track of clues and she was one of the two who figured out the solution - so maybe that is another benefit of ereaders!

A most enjoyable traditional book with great suspense.

Nine Man's Murder is an old-fashioned murder mystery that keeps the reader's interest from beginning to end. The characters are well developed and plot builds so that it is hard to put the book down. I highly recommend getting this book!

Agatha Christie move over! A new master mystery writer is threatening to take your place. I just finished reading Nine Man's Murder and it was every bit as enjoyable as any Christie tale. Author Eric Keith has filled this intriguing mystery with plot twists, locked-room puzzlers and impossible murders. I can usually figure out whodunit by the time I've read half the book. Keith had me stumped to the very end. If you want a real challenge, match wits with the detectives in Nine Man's Murder. You won't be disappointed.