You must, at the very least, admire Janice Hallett’s industry, The Killer Question (2025) being her seventh book since she burst onto the crime fiction scene with her debut, The Appeal (2021). It’s difficult not to feel that some of those books could have used a bit of extra time in the writing, but Hallett deserves to be lauded for the way her sort-of-epistolary approach to storytelling and — especially — character-building has shown such great variety in such a short time. And this latest novel, her fifth for older readers, continues to evince much of what makes her successful…and some of the habits she’s picking up which, for this reader at least, stymie her somewhat.

The setup this time around sees Dominic Eastwood sharing with a TV producer documents that relate to his aunt and uncle Sue and Mal Eastwood “who were involved in a high-profile case a few years ago”. In 2017, the Eastwoods took over the isolated pub The Case is Altered, and, through the framing of discussions about both the weekly pub quiz and communications shared with other landlords of pubs run by the same chain, we get a view of the people involved, the sense of community the Eastwoods are trying to foster, and, of course, a stir of slight unease as you try to anticipate which of the hints of darkness are going to spread beyond their simple beginnings to become the story’s focus.

The reason to keep coming back to Hallett is the way she so easily stirs the verisimilitude of her settings so that those suggestions of unease sit so keenly in a very real world. Whether it’s the landlords facetiously sharing in a group chat the one-star reviews their pubs have received, housing officer Andrew’s despairing reflections on the hopelessness he feels at his job, or the way The Case’s pub quiz begins to fracture teams and friendships, Hallett’s talent comes in making you look in eight directions at once. And the fact that, for some people, the quiz is such a large focus is, of course, bound to be a feature…or, well, is that just what she wants you to think?

There’s some great humour here, too (“I’ve put ‘You can count on a taxing marathon round’ into an anagram solver…”) both in the relationships (c.f. team captain Sid communicating with Mal, then completely misrepresenting what Mal tells him when relating it to the rest of his team) and in the selfish attitudes on display (“[W]hat happened that night took the shine off our win.”). We know, or at least recognise, these people, and Hallett has proven herself time and again when it comes to rubbing these quotidian touches against the ominous (“…it had equally devastating repercussions in 2019.”). The sense of past sins bleeding through, too, keeps you on your toes: does Mal and Sue offering a room to the homeless 19 year-old Fiona, one of Andrew’s clients, evince anything beyond human kindness? And, if not, on whose side is the mendacity to be found?

The most amazing thing here is how much drama and tension Hallett is able to wring from the familiarity of the pub quiz. When a new team shows up and begins to dominate the scene, accusations will fly back and forth, Mal’s attempts to upset what he suspects, but cannot prove, to be cheating behaviour affects everyone in different ways, and, honestly, I was glued to the book for the final third waiting to see how it would all fall out. While some of the final revelations take a little of the shine off the book, let’s not overlook once again how acutely Hallett is able to take something familiar and turn it into a scene of high drama via extremely trenchant character sketches — c.f. Chris, a.k.a. Thor’s Hammer, texting Mal every week, or Mal and Sue sharing exchanges that heighten by how little they reveal (“It’s in the safe.”).

Of course, it doesn’t all work. The nature of Hallett’s presentation requires you to believe that people sat across a table from each other would text back and forth rather than speak, or that Mal and Sue would be texting each other late at night when there’s no-one else around to stop them talking. Elements like this did pull me out of the narrative a little, reminding me that it was a fictional edifice and thus entirely staged, unpicking that great work mentioned above, but if you’re less bothered by metatextual inference — and who isn’t? — you’ll probably be fine. You’re probably one of those people who just reads a book without overthinking it, aren’t you? Wow, what’s that like?

In the final stretch there’s a bit where the developments amusingly mirror, of all things, Morality Play (1995) by Barry Unsworth, and had Hallett stopped there I’d probably add an extra star to the above. But the last couple of twists really do open up more questions than they answer, and while it all feels on a much more tangible level than was (to my reading) unsuccessfully tried in The Examiner (2024), the Big Twist at the heart of the whole thing…I dunno, it just doesn’t quite work, does it? Or at least it could have been seeded better, I feel. Your mileage will naturally vary.

All told, then, The Killer Question shows Hallett still utilising this format which she’s very much made her own very effectively, learning from the mistakes of her previous books though perhaps a little too dependent on the genre expectation of a Grand Reveal that, this time, doesn’t quite tie in to what has come before. I’ll keep reading her adult novels, I enjoy her pointed character work too much to abandon her altogether, but I do wish this was maybe her third book rather than her seventh. Less can be a lot more sometimes.