The Other People: A Novel by C.B. Everett
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
From the Publisher’s Synopsis:
Ten strangers.
An old dark house.
A killer picking them off one by one.
And a missing girl who’s running out of time…
Trust me when I say, I need no more impetus to pick up a book than lines like this in a synopsis. This is the exact set-up I love for a Mystery-Thriller. No matter how times I read them, they never get old for me.
I have fun seeing how each author brings their own style and ideas to this classic set-up, and this one is definitely unique. No one can deny it that.
In The Other People, we have 10-strangers waking up and finding themselves in a locked country house. They have no recollection of how they got there, and yet they have personal items with them, and each of their rooms seems to have been designed with their individuality in mind.
They’re tasked with solving the disappearance of a young woman, who none of them know. They must rescue her before time runs out. And I mean that literally. There’s a timer ticking down every moment.
Adding stress to the already stressful circumstances is the fact that a killer is stalking the house as well, and no one is safe from their dark designs. As the bodies start dropping, pressures rise and everyone is driven to wits end.
While The Other People had a very promising start for me, my enjoyment level ended up being all over the place over the course of the story.
It had a great set-up and I loved the full cast of unlikable characters. They were all so different, what had brought them all together? I also thoroughly-enjoyed the meta-feel of it. It was delivering me a trope-filled Locked Room Murder Mystery, and it knew it.
It felt like we were celebrating that fact together.
Unfortunately, it did start to lose me toward the end. I still feel like it was a good book, it just wasn’t consistent enough for me to give it a higher rating. Frankly, I’m sad about it considering the strong start.
It did have one very unconventional perspective that I really appreciated though; the omniscient nature of it was refreshing and I thought it added to the overall intrigue.
I don’t know. I would still recommend this, for someone looking for a classic-feeling Locked Room Murder Mystery with a Psychological Thriller twist.
Thank you to the publisher, Atria Books, for providing me with a copy to read and review. I liked the risks the author took with this, and I would definitely be interested in reading more from them.