I’m not aware of any author who writes a thriller quite like Janice Hallett. Her books work because they make the reader feel slightly implicated; you are not just being told a story, you are rifling through it. In The Killer Question, that familiar Hallett structure is back in full force: documents, messages, transcripts, pub reviews, quiz materials, and evidence, all compiled by Sue and Mal Eastwood’s nephew as he attempts to turn their lives into a television adaptation.

Sue and Mal are former police officers turned pub landlords, and at the centre of the book is their pub, The Case is Altered, and more specifically, its quiz night. This is such a perfect setting for Hallett that I’m surprised she hasn’t done it before. Pub quizzes are full of petty rivalries, unspoken hierarchies, local gossip, and people who insist they are only there for fun while very obviously caring more than anyone else in the room. It gives the book exactly the right level of absurdity and suspicion.

The plot moves between Sue and Mal’s life at the pub and their past in the police, with the two strands gradually folding into each other. In the present, an irritatingly unbeatable quiz team starts appearing and upsetting the delicate ecosystem of the pub. In the past, Sue and Mal were involved in a kidnapping case that has clearly not been as neatly resolved as everyone might have hoped. As ever with Hallett, the pleasure is in the sorting: reading too much into messages, noticing who replies too quickly, and then realising you still missed half of what was in front of you.

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What impressed me most is how neatly the quiz format mirrors the reading experience. Quiz questions are little acts of controlled misdirection, and this book is constantly asking you to answer the wrong one. By the time the actual “killer question” emerges, you realise Hallett has been directing your attention far more precisely than it first appeared. The format never feels like decoration; it is how the book thinks.

It is also very funny, not in a forced way, but in the much better way of people being recognisably petty, defensive, odd, and British. The pub reviews are particularly brilliant because there are few literary forms more deranged than the angry online review. People will have a bad pint and write as though they have uncovered a human rights violation.

If you need a clean, traditional narrative, Hallett may irritate you. There are a lot of moving parts, a lot of names, and the structure does ask for attention. Occasionally it can feel slightly over-engineered, but I didn’t mind that because the machinery is the story. I had a lot of fun with this. It’s a clever, readable mystery, and probably the only book that has ever made me feel both nostalgic for and deeply suspicious of a pub quiz.

For more regular reading updates, shorter thoughts, and proof that I buy books faster than I read them, follow me on Instagram @adamkhanco.