We’ve all been there, eh? One minute you’re imagining violent and fitting deaths for all the people who demean and annoy you on a daily basis, and the next those very same people are dying in front of you while you’re powerless to help. What? You’ve…not been there? Oh.

Well, Evie, receptionist at the tenant-only gym on the twelfth floor of the exclusive Platinum Peak complex in Edinburgh has, or is about to have — and on her birthday, no less. When a last-minute summons to work sees her and a selection of the tower’s salubrious residents trapped in gym, the electronic locks refusing to open, the internet down, and with no phone signal to speak of, it at first seems like an inconvenience that is going to slightly mar what was going to be yet one more frustrating day in her low-paid existence. But then one of the residents drops dead from no discernible cause, and a second follows soon thereafter in equally baffling circumstances…and so things take, it must be said, a turn for the worse.

Killer Bodies (2023) by Heleen Kist sets itself the tricky challenge of establishing the various people and relationships involved for a few chapters before they all end up trapped together, and does an excellent job of painting cross-purposes relationships and sprinkling in a few secrets which will sprout on the fertile ground of suspicion later. Kist gets the division between the Haves of Platinum Peak and the decidedly more prosaic life of Have-Not Evie well, without resulting too heavily to cliché or mawkishness, and the hinted at backstory of Evie’s injury runs as a nice parallel thread. Additionally, a few lovely turns of phrase — a crying toddler with its “small fists raised in infant insurgence”, for example — stand out well against the background of this setup, so you know you’re not just being rushed through things to get to the slaughter ASAP.

Sprinkled in are chapters from the perspective of new resident Suki Aksornpan who clearly has something in mind for these people, familiar to her even if they don’t know who she is, and whose calmness in the face of the death that will result sees the classic establishment of Othering tied not just to her race but also paralleled in Evie’s own shunning by the wealthy Types.

She’s not accounted for this. This complete lack of logic from what should have been intelligent people.

Once everyone is contained in the gym, things initially move quickly: we go through surprise, irritation, bargaining, and acceptance in record quick time, and then someone dies and someone else follows quickly as things take a serious turn. Kist, though, never lets the wry humour of the situation completely dry up…

Suki stifled a laugh as she anchored herself to his firm [handshake]. It was all surreal. The man introducing himself politely, too much detail, a half-naked feminist by his side and two dead bodies on the floor. And it wasn’t even ten o’clock.

…and, while the finger of suspicion moves back and forth, a good job is done in examining what they know on the way to reaching a consensus about what’s happening.

The book is most successful in this regard, with a really superb job done in examining false solutions, building well on the trust or absence thereof in the group, and trying to intelligently think through who might be responsible and how the deaths are being achieved. It’s a tight and limited setup, but Kist’s early work with the characters pays off, and some genuinely very clever reasoning is applied to find answers, a neat bit of detective induction in the midst of what is otherwise something of a more modern thriller. Indeed, a lot of the false answers offered would make a good solution to this were it ever edited down to a short story, a sort of reverse Poisoned Chocolates Case (1929) if you will.

It also can’t be denied that the pace of this does slack off after that second death. It’s understandable — if you killed everyone that quickly there’s be no-one left for the remaining 70% of the book, just bodies decomposing in a locked room, and no-one wants to read that (well, someone probably does…) — but, wow, does the book ever devolve into the above (undeniably intelligent) discussion and rounds of accusation. I applaud Kist’s decision to keep the focus on the group in the gym, which makes the character dynamics all the more interesting, and she does a great job of trying to make things feel dynamic by having people move from room to room to room…but once I realised that we didn’t feel further on and we were still going round in the same circles, I can’t deny that my enthusiasm took a bit of a dent.

Some lovely conceits are deployed to sustain interest — I could have done with more of the between-chapters pictures from Evie’s notebooks detailing the violent deaths of the block’s denizens, because they (by a very talented Instagrammer I can only identify as Hypocritical Penguin) are schlocky and magnificent — and Kist clearly doesn’t lack for ingenuity when it comes to murderous methods. That Evie’s sketchbook, in which she imagined the demises of these unpleasant sorts, has gone missing adds a degree of intrigue, but since the deaths in no way match her hilariously cartoonish imaginings this seam of things never quite felt fully developed to me, despite paving the way for a lot of the suspicion aimed her way.

All told, Killer Bodies is a fun time, and one that has no right to be as well-explored as it is: about as close as this sort of thriller will ever get to detective fiction, and wonderful to see. Prepare to be able to skip a few of the more maunder-y chapters — thankfully the chapters here are all short and punchy, which makes for quick and easy reading — but, for the patient, there’s a nicely-imbricated scheme here with some surprising answers in its tail.