Home » Book Reviews » Janice Hallett » The Killer Question by Janice Hallett
Possible spoilers ahead
I absolutely adore Janice Hallett’s books (and I suspect I have said something similar in my introduction to every review of her books I’ve written on this site!) and, eeek, this one is about pub quizzes which are also very addictive and great fun and test people’s knowledge, which are all aspects of Hallett’s books that I love, so I think this is a genius subject choice for her, and I can’t wait to begin it! Grab your copy and let’s read it together!
Dominic Eastwood contacts a TV production company in October 2024 suggesting they might be interested in the story of his uncle and aunt (Mal and Sue) and the events that happened to them while they owned The Case Is Altered pub from December 2017 until they disappeared in December 2019, and adds that the police have forwarded him the case files so he now has all the details to share. Dominic says that the pub was situated in Hertfordshire, in an isolated position on a lonely narrow lane which leads to the River Colne, and this was Mal and Sue’s first attempt to run a pub and they were determined to make a success of what had been a struggling pub. All the local pubs under the same brewery were in a Whatsapp group and shared details of difficult customers (such as a quiz team who cheated) and shared bad reviews they had received (and shared their responses to the reviewers), and Dominic provides these Whatsapp messages to the TV production team. Oooh, I love the name of the pub, The Case Is Altered, it sounds like the title of a detective book! And what a brilliant scheme of Hallett’s to have Dominic relay the story to the TV company as it happened, as that’s a beautiful method to unfold it to the reader too, though I’m not sure if Mal and Sue texting each other is completely likely, I obviously understand Hallett needs their conversations recorded for us to read somehow but they are husband and wife and also colleagues so surely they would just speak to each other? I can see that if one of them wasn’t employed at the pub and they were relating details of their day as it unfolds then texting would fit more as they would be in different places, but that’s not the case.
From the records of 2019 it is shown that Mal and Sue introduce weekly quiz nights and other schemes to bring in customers, and The Plucky Losers are the quiz team who win most regularly. One evening a quiz team of cheats turns up but as the other landlords have warned Mal and Sue about this group, and given the description that one of the males wears a big orange jacket, Mal throws them out and the local police officer Arthur shows up when Sue calls him. Later, a new quiz team arrive, called The Shadow Knights, and they win by a huge margin week after week, even after Mal makes the questions much harder and more obscure, and this upsets the leader of The Plucky Losers team (Chris) who resorts to switching some of their team mates and changing their team name to The Sturdy Challengers. The Shadow Knights team decline to provide their individual names, their leader saying they can just call him ‘General Knowledge’. Hmmm, there was an earlier (seemingly insignificant) incident here when Mal and Sue were texted to the pub mobile by someone anonymous and Mal seemed quick to suggest contacting the police about it which made me wonder if Mal and Sue perhaps had a history of being threatened before or perhaps a secret earlier life they wanted kept secret. However, later it just seemed that Arthur (the local policeman) had offered help to them because their pub is a little isolated, so perhaps that was all it was. But then this makes me wonder if there was a reason why they had chosen such an isolated pub, as none of the other pub landlords wanted to take it on and they all seemed surprised that Mal and Sue had signed up for such a long tenancy (20 years), so is there something significant in that, were Mal and Sue wanting to hide away somewhere isolated for a long time? Or perhaps it’s just in order to demonstrate to the reader that something dramatic must have happened to cause them to leave the pub after only two years when they had intended to run it for 20 years or more. And it could just be me looking for suspicious things (but isn’t that the joy of Hallett’s books?!), but was there something more that happened between Mal and the cheat in the orange jacket, as Mal seemed to be outside for quite a while and wasn’t responding to Sue’s texts urging him to come back inside to continue the quiz? And could it be that these cheats are now the new winning team (The Shadow Knights) having disguised themselves a little, as this new team seems to have come out of nowhere with none of the other pub landlords having ever seen them? And The Shadow Knights team don’t provide their names, hmmm, they are certainly intriguing, though their leader always seems very polite and friendly and always texts the pub mobile to thank Mal and Sue for such an enjoyable quiz! I note that we’re also regularly being shown the seating arrangements of the quiz teams, so is this relevant? Or perhaps it just serves the purpose of showing us who has switched teams. We are also shown the quiz questions too, so I wonder if this is relevant? Or perhaps it’s just to add another interest for the reader to try and see if they know the answers (which I rarely do!)? And I do admire Mal for insisting on writing his own quiz questions, whereas the other pub landlords use quiz books for theirs. But I have to admit that I’m feeling a bit like it’s taking a while for something to happen (and this is probably why I’m desperately scratching around for anything that could possibly be suspicious!), I’m sure Hallett is busy laying clues for us later but it just seems like quite a chunk of the book has gone by already with nothing much having happened. And as an aside, are we going to be given the answers to those couple of quiz questions at the very start of the book before the story began, tee hee, as I even wonder if the answers are possible clues to the plot, knowing how sneakily clever Hallett is!
From the records of 2019 it is shown that during the night of 1st October a boat sailing along the river hits the old pier at the end of the lane that The Case pub is on, and when the pier breaks up the body of the man in the orange jacket from The Cheats team is discovered. The body had been pinned underwater and the police estimate it had been there for at least a week. The dead man is later identified as Luke Goode, a former actor. Meanwhile, Fiona, (a girl in hostel accommodation who is on The Sturdy Challengers quiz team) is invited by Mal and Sue to move into the pub and work behind the bar, which she accepts, though some of the other quiz members warn Mal and Sue to be careful as they don’t know Fiona that well. All the quiz members give statements to the police about the night The Cheats team turned up at the pub, as do the other members of The Cheats team and also Mal. One of the quiz members mentions to the police that he saw another quiz member, Harrison, turn down the lane towards the river and that he seemed to be in a hurry. In his statement to the police, Mal describes throwing out The Cheats team and exchanging a few ‘light punches’ with Luke. Luke’s girlfriend, Stephanie, tells the police that Luke had mentioned seeing someone he recognised in the pub that night and had said he was going to wait outside till closing time for the person to come out. Sue spots that their pub sign of two lawyers has been painted over and now shows one lawyer having been hanged and one having been stabbed. Due to ongoing suspicions that The Shadow Knights team are somehow cheating in the quiz, Mal creates questions that no-one would know (using answers provided by an old lady in a care home) and also proves that The Shadow Knights team aren’t hacking his computer or phone to find the questions beforehand as that team then scored very poorly at the quiz. Back in 2024, Dominic tells the production company that Mal and Sue used to be police officers and were involved in a highly confidential kidnapping case in 2014, when Beata Novak and Chloe Cunningham were kidnapped by drug dealers (the Maddox brothers) in order to force rival drug dealer Darren Chester to come out of hiding as both these women were in a relationship with him. Oooh, so we have a dead body! And it is the Cheat in the orange jacket (later identified as Luke), so was I right to suspect that Mal did more than just punch him when they were outside? In his police statement about the incident Mal said they just exchanged light punches, but did one of Mal’s punches unexpectedly result in Luke’s death and Mal then felt he needed to conceal the body?! It was 2nd September when Mal threw Luke out of his pub, and the police later confirmed that it was on 2nd September that Luke died, so it really is pointing towards him dying at Mal’s hands! And it was later discovered that the spike used to pin down Luke’s body under the water came from the bike sheds at The Case pub, so that seems to be another hint incriminating Mal with him possibly grabbing the spike spontaneously to dispose of the body he suddenly had to deal with! Or are we just being led tantalisingly to think that Mal is involved by Hallett, masterful tease that she is?! It’s interesting that Luke knew someone inside the pub though, who could this have been? Was it Harrison (who was apparently heading towards the river in a hurry) who then killed Luke because Luke knew a secret about Harrison’s past? And is all of this something to do with the top-secret police operation in 2014 that Mal and Sue were involved in, was Luke one of the drug dealers and recognised one of the other drug dealers (though that would be a huge coincidence to have both the police and the guilty parties all at that pub!), or did he recognise Mal and Sue as being the police officers at that time, but then why would Mal want to kill him, a drug dealer would surely have more to fear from Mal than Mal had to fear from him, unless there was something dodgy about what Mal and Sue did when they were police officers? And the pub sign being altered is a bit worrying, as is this a warning that someone is going to be hanged (if we think Luke was kind of stabbed, by being pinned down under the water), so the alteration in the sign is a warning of what will happen? It’s frustrating that Mal and Sue didn’t notice when the sign was altered, as that makes a difference with whether it was a threat of killings to come (ie, it was painted before Luke’s death and the killer was warning what he was going to do, although that would then mean that Luke’s murder was pre-meditated), or whether it is possibly a message to the murderer of Luke that the sign-painter knows what they did and they will be punished for this, presumably by being hanged (so it was painted after Luke’s death), or it could be nothing to do with Luke’s death and is just a threat to Mal and Sue for some reason. And conveniently we now have a possible reason why Mal and Sue might have enemies, with them being police officers in the past. I’m kind of discounting the fierce competition of the pub quiz teams as a possible motive for murder as they didn’t have anything to do with Luke, whereas if it was Mal who had been murdered or one of the other successful team members then perhaps that would be the motive for a pub quiz member to have done it. Perhaps I’m wrong but I’m just seeing this quiz team rivalry as an aside in the story really. And as another aside (!), I’ve also noticed that Mal and Sue share the pub phone and there is no way for the person communicating with them by text to know whether it is Mal or Sue until they state which one they are, so I wonder if this could be used in some significant way in the future with one of them concealing their identity and pretending to be the other person to perhaps gain information that wasn’t intended for them? And there’s the odd mention of Chris’ ‘top secret’ work (when Sue worries that she may have accidentally hinted at this to the the leader of The Shadow Knights team), so I wonder what Chris does for a job and also if it is something to do with the story or just another tease by Hallett. And Sue makes a very good point that the leader of The Shadow Knights team didn’t once ask about the body during his texts to her, so was that because he knew the body was already there because he put it there?!
From the records of 2019 it is shown that Fiona has learnt that Mal and Sue used to be police officers, as she saw their warrant cards when she was helping Sue tidy the office. Sue instructs her not to tell anyone about this, but she tells fellow quiz member Andrew who also shares it with another quiz member, not realising that it’s supposed to be confidential, and it then continues to be shared amongst others. Fiona also sees Mal’s gun in the safe and shares this discovery with Andrew as well. The Shadow Knights team don’t return to The Case pub after losing Mal’s unusual quiz, which delights The Sturdy Challengers team who return to their winning ways. The police discover that the spike used to pin down Luke’s body had recently been sharpened, and also that there was female DNA on the part of the spike which wasn’t submerged in the water. The people sailing the boat that hit the jetty and dislodged Luke’s body, are a man calling himself Cloud and a woman calling herself Wind. Wind joins one of the pub quiz teams and tells them that Cloud used to be a police officer. The local police officer, Arthur, speaks to Harrison again about why he went down to the river that night but hadn’t mentioned this in his statement, and Harrison explains that he was meeting a man there who cancelled the meet-up and he shows Arthur the text messages between him and this man but explains that he doesn’t want people to know about this part of his life so this is why he hadn’t mentioned it before. Oh dear, Fiona hasn’t kept the fact of Mal and Sue being ex-police confidential, as Sue had asked her to do, hmmm, that worries me! And now we have a gun on the premises too, and which presumably Fiona can access as it sounds like she opened the safe herself. But as an aside, awww, I do like Andrew from The Sturdy Challengers team, mostly because I feel a bit sorry for him, bless him, as he is so diligent at his Social Services job and yet is overworked and feels underappreciated but he still goes the extra mile for the clients and cares deeply for their welfare, such as chasing all over to try and locate Fiona when she left the hostel and moved in with Mal and Sue without telling anyone, he is clearly a worrier too as demonstrated with how quickly he escalated things when he thought Fiona was missing, with more and more frantic text messages to her, and while I feel for him (being a fellow worrier myself), Hallett does portray his worrying in quite a comical way. And we have a bit more information now about Chris’ mystery job when he was surreptitiously texting a fellow quiz member while at work, with him saying about the risk of someone pressing the wrong button and there being a meltdown while he was away from his desk and him mentioning that it was his turn to run the collider, so does that give a clue to what his job is, could it be that he works at a nuclear power station?! It was interesting too that Mal and Sue (and presumably most of the others) don’t know what job Chris does but know it’s something mysterious/secret, as I had presumed that Sue knew what the job was when she was worried about giving it away but it seems she doesn’t actually know. And as an aside, I do really admire the work and dedication that Mal puts into his quiz questions, and they sound really interesting and varied themes of questions too, I’d love to know the actual questions (as we only get the titles of each round), as his is just the type of pub quiz I’d love to go to! And it’s interesting that The Shadow Knights team have now gone to another pub’s quiz, as if they are cheating then perhaps them doing this at another place might give a hint of how they are doing it. Though I’m tempted to think they’re not cheating myself, as all of the team leader’s texts to Mal and Sue are full of trivia facts, like he can’t help expanding on every little subject and adding facts he knows about, so I think he has just got one of those minds that absorb facts and has surrounded himself with similar people to form a crack quiz team, so they’re just extremely skilled rather than cheating. But their wish to remain as anonymous as possible does seem a bit odd, but perhaps they have jobs which other quiz teams might say give them an extra advantage (though there’s no restriction on what job you have if you are part of a pub quiz team obviously, but perhaps they’ve experienced hostility before because of this so just conceal their identity and therefore their jobs to avoid unpleasantness). But back to the dead body! So the spike being sharpened implies pre-meditation rather than it just being grabbed spontaneously, although it could have been sharpened for another purpose (and could that have been for the stabbing implied on the pub repainting but then someone grabbed the weapon and used it for another purpose?). And the female DNA on the spike rather ruins my Mal-as-the-killer theory, though I guess the female could just have touched the spike for another reason (to sharpen as a weapon, or just innocently moving it?). And hmmm, that’s interesting about Harrison, it does sound a genuine reason for him being at the river with the text messages to back it up, but there is still the oddness of him staying down there for so long after he realised his date wasn’t showing up, and also (on the back of the female DNA on the spike) him saying that he saw a dog down by the river who belongs to a woman at the quiz…so who was this dog-owner down by the river that night? I feel sure there must have been a mention in one of the many chats between quiz members about someone’s dog, something completely innocuous probably like they were late to the quiz due to feeding the dog or the dog doing something naughty like running away, something I’d not taken any notice of as it would have seemed of no importance, arrggh! I’ve just flicked back through the book (I find this is inevitable with Hallett’s wonderfully teasing books!) and I can’t see any mention of any dogs at all, but it’s just occurred to me if Bailey (as in Rita and Bailey, on one of the pub quiz teams) is actually a dog, and Hallett is being super sneaky by not making this obvious?! Going back through the book again with this in mind, there is nothing obvious to state that Bailey is a dog until Linda says that Bailey ‘has that horrible habit of licking my ankles under the table’, which surely does imply he’s a dog (as otherwise that would be very disturbing, tee hee!). Rita has barely featured in the story though (her main mention was that she likes to drink too much!) so if she is actually a major player in all this and was down by the river and had something to do with Luke’s death, then that’s extraordinarily sneaky and clever of Hallett (in fact, just the qualities Hallett is known for and why I adore her books so much, tee hee!!).
Back in 2024 Dominic provides more records to the production company of the 2014 police operation (called Operation Honeyguide) that Mal and Sue were involved in. These show that the first girl kidnapped (Beata) has been found dead, and that Mal and Sue are beginning to have suspicions about the police operation and wondering if the Maddox brothers are actually controlling DCI Lewis Parry (the police officer who is leading the operation and briefing the team), and are planning that the police will find Chester for them. Mal and Sue suspect this because the team is only ever briefed by DCI Parry, rather than by a range of people from the Anti-Kidnap and Extortion Unit, and because the kidnapper seems to have insider knowledge of the location of cameras in the city in order to avoid them all, and because they are surprised to discover that there is no large police presence at the site in the woods where Chloe was kidnapped (as Mal and Sue have visited the site secretly themselves), and because none of the local morgues have a body there with Beata’s name (as Sue secretly phoned them all to enquire). Sue even begins to become suspicious about their very friendly colleague, DS Dee Obasi, as she seemed to know the instructions being given to them privately by DCI Parry. Meanwhile, Chloe’s parents learn that Mal and Sue once covered up a killing and let a murderer go free, so they use this information to force Mal and Sue to agree to ask the informer in the case to get a message to the Maddox brothers saying that they will pay double the money that rival drug dealer Dareren Chester stole from them if they release Chloe. Sue shares some of her suspicions about the police operation with DS Obasi, who then tells Sue that she has located the morgue where Beata’s body is. The three of them visit the morgue and examine Beata’s body. Hmmm, is Sue right to be suspicious of DS Obasi? It does seem odd that Sue mentions her suspicions of the police operation and Beata’s body not being at any of the local morgues, and then DS Obasi ‘finds’ the morgue with the body and arranges for them all to view it. And I have so many questions about the viewing of Beata’s body!! Firstly, I wasn’t sure if Mal and Sue and DS Obasi discovered the cause of Beata’s death by looking at her body, as they don’t actually state this to each other but there’s that ‘barely audible whisper’ and the word ‘oh, when they seem to be looking at Beata’s head. Afterwards Mal says that the cause of death was obviously an overdose by the puncture wounds on the body’s hands, but Sue seems unsure about this herself, so what was the ‘barely audible whisper’ and the ‘oh’ about? And secondly, it also strikes me that it would be pretty easy for the police to find a dead drug addict and pass her off as Beata, so was the body actually Beata’s?! Sue said ‘you can tell it’s her’, but how can they tell? I’ve gone back through the book (yet again!) and I can’t see that there was any description given of Beata apart from that she was a nail technician, so was it just perfectly manicured nails that led Sue to say ‘you can tell it’s her’? DS Obasi asked about tattoos or piercings on the body but Sue says she didn’t see any, but I can’t see that it was stated in any of the police briefings that Beata had tattoos or piercings. It does seem more and more likely that that 2014 police operation is relevant to what happened at the pub in 2019, and if Sue is right that a high-ranking police officer was involved in the 2014 kidnapping then I can imagine they might have that police officer and potentially the drug dealers keen to seek revenge on them, eeek! And Cloud was a police officer, so is he perhaps one of the corrupt police officers who Mal and Sue potentially exposed and is he seeking revenge on them? And I was very concerned about Mal and Sue covering up a killing, as I can’t imagine them doing that, but it seems that they thought it was a mercy killing (regarding someone called Ramsey) and only found out later that it was actually murder but by then they had incriminated themselves so the murderer could then force them to continue to conceal the crime and let him/her go unpunished. I am also now wondering if this secret of them concealing the mercy killing is relevant to what’s going on in 2019, as could it be that Luke knew this secret and perhaps threatened Mal with it so Mal had to silence him for? Or (omg, this has just occurred to me!) did Mal and Sue disappear with the money that Chloe’s parents gave them to pay the Maddox Brothers, and their whereabouts at the pub was then discovered and they had to flee again or were punished for what they’d done?! Surely, surely not, they would never do that (I do really like Mal and Sue!), plus if you were in hiding with someone else’s money why would you open a pub and deal with the public and all under your own names (as the records of the police operation in 2014 have them listed as Mal and Sue Eastwood, which are still their names in 2019). Oooh, this book is so good, I’m loving all the speculation I am indulging in, Hallett is so good at laying breadcrumbs of many hints and possible clues and pathways so my mind just goes wild with it all! And she’s also been ingenious again with keeping the epistolary format for the 2014 police operation, as Mal and Sue handily wear body-worn cameras so their conversations with each other and with other people are all there in transcript, perfect! But it is getting a little confusing keeping three timelines straight in my mind (the police operation in 2014, Mal and Sue owning the pub in 2019, and Dominic in 2024), it does seem to be a little overly-complicated and is requiring a lot of concentration!! And as an aside, I want more and more to actually see the quiz questions that Mal writes, especially for the quiz on 11th November as it sounds wonderful with the contestants having to guess the title and author of 50 book covers, eeek! And again, I so much admire the work Mal puts into these questions, it must take so much of his time, though clearly he adores pub quizzes and used to love taking part in them himself so I imagine he loves writing them and being quiz master, so the whole thing is a pleasure rather than a chore.
From the records of 2019 it is shown that one of the other pub landlords, Paul, has said in the pubs’ whatsapp group that The Shadow Knights team turned up there and that he has discovered how they have been cheating, so Mal and Sue invite the other pub landlords to their quiz night so Paul can demonstrate how The Shadow Knights team cheat. Just before this quiz begins, Sue discovers that something important is missing from the safe and knows it must have been taken by Fiona. Also just before the quiz, Chris finally tells Mal what his top-secret job is, which is that he is on a factory production line preparing the in-flight food for planes. The quiz takes place and results in a draw between The Shadow Knights team and The Sturdy Challengers team, which then causes anger from The Shadow Knights team who block the door to prevent anyone leaving, and in Harrison’s statement later to the police he says the doors to The Case pub never opened again. From the records of 2014 it is shown that Mal and Sue collect the suitcases of money from Chloe’s parents in order to give these to the informer, but they are apprehended by DCI Parry and DS Obasi who say the whole Operation Honeyguide was devised in order to capture Mal and Sue as they are suspected of stealing money from many victims over their 16 year careers as police officers, as well as recently stealing a diamond ring from the body in the morgue, so Chloe’s parents are actually actors (siblings Tanya and Ian Frost) brought in to play the part of worried parents. Back in 2024 Dominic tells the production company that Mal and Sue had conned the life savings from his parents, and from anyone else they could fool into giving them money. Omg, noooo, surely Mal and Sue can’t be corrupt, no no no, I liked them so much, I really can’t believe they would do that! But did they, or have they just been set up? Or have they been recruited in order to expose another corrupt police officer (DS Obasi or DCI Parry perhaps?) so it’s all a double-double bluff where Obasi/Parry thinks Mal and Sue are being exposed but actually they are in on it and part of the trick is to make Obasi/Parry think that they are guilty? Or am I just desperate to not have Mal and Sue as bad people, and am clutching at straws now, tee hee?! Though Dominic saying that they stole the life savings from his parents seems to point towards their guilt…oh god! And the dramas just keep coming in all of the time-frames I’m frantically trying to keep track of (!), as that final quiz night in 2019 was written very teasingly, as there was obviously a lot happening but we were only getting people’s puzzled and then alarmed reactions rather than full descriptions of the events! Very sneaky! And it is implied that The Case pub was shut after that and Mal and Sue disappeared, so are we not to get more explanation at this point of what happened at that quiz in 2019, we (well, me!) are just left wildly speculating?! But it seems that Paul foiled The Shadow Knights team from cheating, which resulted in a draw with The Sturdy Challengers team and then a tiebreak question from Mal which then resulted in anger on The Shadow Knights team which seems intriguing in itself, so was this anger due to them being foiled in their cheating, or was it due to people now knowing how they cheated so they can’t now use this method at any of the other pubs in the area, or due to them (possibly) being accused of cheating when they hadn’t, or was it due to the tiebreak question (possibly) being unfair, or did their anger come from something else entirely, possibly something related to Mal and Sue’s past. And then there’s the stolen gun (as I presume it was the gun which was the missing item), so was this then introduced into the angry scene too?! Oooh, I hope we get more details! And then there’s the reveal of Chris’ job, which I know is quite minor compared to all the other dramas (!) but I love it as it demonstrates beautifully how you can get easily carried away in your own imagination just by a few leading hints, and how Hallett knows this and uses it to her advantage, tee hee! And I had been agonising over Chris’ phone ID being ‘Thor’s Hammer’ and what clue this could be to his job, but arrgh, this was just another red herring as it was because his deceased son changed the ID on Chris’ phone so he doesn’t want to alter it back and lose this action of his son’s (though does this seeming red herring actually lead somewhere, is there more to this dead son…?!).
Back in 2024 Dominic gives the production company the transcripts of the conversations and planning in 2014 between DS Obasi and DCI Parry to incriminate Mal and Sue, and of their interviews with Mal and Sue after they have been arrested. But DS Obasi shares with Tanya and Ian Frost (the actors playing Chloe’s parents) that Mal and Sue can’t actually be charged with any crime because there was very little evidence for the older frauds as the victims had now died, and because Operation Honeyguide was entirely fictitious this means that they haven’t actually committed any real crimes, and their lawyer maintained that they were acting under duress when they took the suitcase of money because Tanya and Ian had threatened them (by saying they would report them for concealing a murder unless they agreed to give the money to the Maddox Brothers for Chloe’s release). She explains that the case also won’t be shared with the media either, so Mal and Sue won’t be publicly shamed, because it is felt that the public needs to have trust in the police so publicising this case of police corruption would harm that. Tanya and Ian are bitterly disappointed that the only punishment which can be given to Mal and Sue is that they are sacked from the police force and lose their pensions (and have no savings to fall back on, due to them spending all proceeds of their previous crimes), as they are passionate about bringing conmen to justice after their own mother had been a victim of crime. A few years later, Tanya and Ian contact DS Obasi saying they have been following Mal and Sue (ensuring they are disguised so as not to be recognised by them) and have discovered they are training to run a pub. Tanya and Ian have tried to warn the brewery against Mal and Sue but weren’t listened to, so they ask DS Obasi to intervene. However, they are urged by DS Obasi to stop following Mal and Sue, as they could get into trouble themselves for this. Tanya and Ian reply, saying they understand and are now planning to go travelling. Back in 2024 Dominic gives the production company the police statements from the quiz members after the final quiz at The Case pub in 2019. Mal’s tiebreaker question, after The Shadow Knights team and The Sturdy Challengers team had drawn, is how has The Shadow Knights team cheated for the last ten weeks, and due to The Shadow Knights team not giving an answer, The Sturdy Challengers team are declared the winners. Paul (the pub landlord who discovered how The Shadow Knights team cheated) then addresses everyone and says that The Shadow Knights team had used miniature ear pieces in order to communicate with someone outside looking up the answers, so he had foiled them by using a device he’d gained from his time in the army to jam their signal. Omg, how clever of Mal to come up with that tiebreak question with The Shadow Knights team being trapped as whatever they answer just leads to their doom, as if they answer correctly to win by saying how they cheated this then confirms their guilt, and if they answer by saying they haven’t cheated then this is the wrong answer so The Sturdy Challengers team win! That is complete genius, I love it! But wow, we now have Tanya and Ian Frost introduced as potentially key players in this storyline! And I doubt they will be content to leave Mal and Sue alone, I suspect this ‘going travelling’ thing is a bit convenient! But I still have so many questions! Where does ex-police officer Cloud come into all this, and Luke too? Are either of them used by Tanya and Ian (in 2019) to seek revenge on Mal and Sue? Is Cloud someone from the police operation in 2014? Is Luke related to a victim of one of Mal and Sue’s older frauds? And do any of the pub quiz team members from 2019 come into any of this at all as well? Arrggh! And there’s also still the missing gun in 2019, who has that and why did they take it and what are they planning to do with it?! And as an aside, with Mal and Sue being sacked from the police then surely they wouldn’t be allowed to keep their police guns, would they? But to be honest, I’m still reeling that Mal and Sue indeed appear to be bad people, sigh, after I was really hoping it was some kind of double-bluff and they were actually good guys! Phew, things are moving along at quite a pace now the end of the book is approaching, and it’s hard work keeping all the different storylines in my mind!
From the records of 2019 it is shown that the leader of The Shadow Knights team speaks to everyone, explaining that they cheated in order to show Mal and Sue what it feels like to be cheated, and he then reveals that Mal and Sue were corrupt police officers who stole from people. Mal immediately says that they were never found guilty of this, but then admits that the allegations are true. Sue insists that they have now changed and decided to only do good after that point, and Mal asks everyone if they will choose to judge them on what they did in the past or choose to judge them on what they have done more recently to help people and the community. Cloud then enters the pub and says he used to work Mal and Sue when they were police officers, as did the leader of The Shadow Knights team. Cloud then says that the people standing infront of him are not Mal and Sue Eastwood. What?!!! Omg, what a bombshell this is, what can this mean, omg?! And wow, what a wonderful writer Hallett is to still be able to bring in such shocks and twists at this point and completely knock me off my feet just when I thought everything was being tied up and explained, she is incredible! And I feel cheated again, as I was beginning to feel that I was perhaps right in liking Mal and Sue, as the Mal and Sue I ‘knew’ from 2019 were good people and had turned their lives around to do good deeds…but now I feel I can’t like them as they’re not actually Mal and Sue, arrrggh! Who are they then? I guess though this would explain why they hadn’t recognised Cloud or the leader of The Shadow Knights team, even though they all seemingly worked together in the police force, as they hadn’t actually worked together in the police force! So are these pretenders Tanya and Ian Frost? I guess this would perhaps explain why they communicated so much by text (which bothered me at the start of the book) because Tanya and Ian are siblings so therefore wouldn’t be in the same bedroom as each other at night time. But why would Tanya and Ian do this? Is it a link with cheating (which seems to run throughout the book), had Tanya and Ian decided to punish Mal and Sue by cheating them out of their identities by pretending to be them? But then what punishment would this be to Mal and Sue in the long-term, and what gain would this be to Tanya and Ian in the long-term? And of course, what has happened to the original Mal and Sue, why have they not popped up and challenged these people pretending to be them? Are they dead? Have they been killed by these people pretending to be them?! But then (again), if so then why? Ok, I will stop speculating and read on as that’s the fastest way to find out, tee hee!!!
From the records of 2019 it is shown that DS Obasi walks into the pub and addresses the couple as Tanya and Ian Frost and says that they are under arrest for the murder of Mal and Sue Eastwood in 2017, and the murder of Luke Goode in 2019. She says that The Shadow Knights team is her undercover police team, as she was curious if Mal and Sue were up to their old tricks of conning people when she heard they had taken on the running of a pub but didn’t want to speak to them herself so sent the police’s quiz team along (which Mal and Sue used to be part of) to see how Mal and Sue would react when they recognised them. They therefore realised that ‘Mal and Sue’ were actually Tanya and Ian, so decided to continue as a pub quiz in order to learn more about why they were doing this and to play with their minds by cheating with having DS Osabi outside looking up the answers. She says that Cloud is actually DCI Parry (having genuinely become a hippie after he retired from the police force) and that he was keen to help DS Osabi learn more about what Tanya and Ian were doing so offered to moor his boat near the pub to chat to them and try to discover more that way (though he concealed from his partner Wind the real reason they were in the area), as he had altered so much since his time as a police officer that he felt sure they wouldn’t recognise him, and he then accidentally discovered Luke’s body. DS Osabi believes that the genuine Mal and Sue successfully passed the pub tenancy course and accepted the tenancy of The Case Is Altered pub, and Tanya and Ian (who were still following them) responded to the card that Mal placed on the local supermarket noticeboard seeking a cleaning service for the pub and applied for this position, and they killed Mal and Sue outside the pub when they first turned up to view the cleaning that needed doing, and as they had genuinely worked as cleaners before (inbetween acting jobs) they could efficiently get rid of the evidence. She says that they killed Luke because he had been an actor and recognised them from their time as actors. DS Osabi says the gun in the safe is a stage prop engraved with Ian Frost’s name. She also says that she painted over the pub sign because it angered her to see it depicting law and justice when this wasn’t dealt out to Mal and Sue as corrupt police officers and this had then resulted in Tanya and Ian feeling like they needed to take the law into their own hands. The bodies of Mal and Sue are later found in the grounds outside the pub, having been battered to death. Tanya and Ian are given minimum 20 years’ jail sentences, though they refuse to say exactly what happened regarding the murders of the Eastwoods and what drove them to do it. Omg, I was right about it being Tanya and Ian then, however unlikely that seemed!! And even more omg (!), I was also right about them murdering the real Mal and Sue! But even though I suggested it, I didn’t really believe it! And so the pub quiz team thing is very relevant to the whole story after all, as The Shadow Knights were Mal and Sue’s old team and they helped discover that Mal and Sue had been killed! I wondered why The Shadow Knights team went to the quiz at the other pub though, if their aim was just to study Tanya and Ian at The Case pub, particularly as them going there meant that their cheating technique was revealed, but this was explained as being because they believed this made them look more genuine if they were apparently angry after Mal/Ian did the trick quiz with the answers from the elderly lady. I also wondered why Wind had mentioned to the pub quiz members that Cloud was an ex-police officer, as surely there was a risk that this information could have alarmed Tanya and Ian, but I guess that is explained too as she wasn’t aware of that Cloud was helping DS Osabi, and it obviously didn’t alarm Tanya and Ian anyway (plus it was a nice clue for the reader, even though I didn’t guess its relevance, tee hee!). And omg, we were told that Luke used to be an actor but that fact just seemed irrelevant and of course it wasn’t (as him being an actor meant that he recognised Tanya and Ian as they had acted together in the past)! And I didn’t see the relevance of so many of the pub quiz questions being about Shakespeare or other plays, as of course Ian knew this subject well. And omg, I disregarded the information that Tanya and Ian used to run a cleaning service inbetween acting jobs. Wow, I have been a bit rubbish at missing things that were relevant and labelling other things as red herrings or irrelevant that actually were important, though that’s the fun of these types of books and particularly so with such a gifted writer who crafts her plot so superbly and teases the reader so deliciously! And it was confirmed that Bailey is Rita’s dog, so perhaps I can give myself a pat on the back for that (perhaps?), and I guess I was technically correct in that ‘Mal’ did kill Luke (but there’s obviously the fact that it wasn’t actually Mal, it was Ian pretending to be Mal!).
Back in 2024 Dominic tells the production company that he had later been contacted by a former prison officer of Tanya’s who had confiscated the script for a play Tanya was writing for her fellow prisoners in the drama classes she runs in prison, and that this script seemed to deal with Mal and Sue’s killing. It reveals that Mal and Sue were at first shocked to see Tanya and Ian but then began laughing at them which resulted in Tanya and Ian losing their tempers and a fight beginning, with Ian finally picking up a large stone and killing them. Dominic adds that DS Osabi has seen this script and confirms that although it seems to have been Ian who did the actual killing of Mal and Sue (and also of Luke), that Tanya still deserves to be in jail as she was complicit in all the killings and it was her DNA on the spike used to pin down Luke’s body. Dominic later buys The Case is Altered pub and introduces a pub quiz, saying he is honouring his uncle and aunt by doing so, and Chris (from The Sturdy Challengers team) and Fiona work there for him, though DS Osabi believes he is trying to profit by the publicity and this is also why he shared the story with the TV production company and urged them to film the documentary.
Well, I thoroughly enjoyed reading that! It was great fun, and a great mystery with some wonderful twists in it, and what twists they were too, she really is such a clever writer! I am still reeling from the twist that the kidnapping was all a fake, and the twist that Mal and Sue weren’t actually Mal and Sue, there honestly is no-one like Hallett, I just adore her! I loved the repeated theme running beautifully through the book that people aren’t who they appear to be, such as Tanya and Ian Frost not actually being Chloe’s worried parents and then of course not actually being Mal and Sue, the body in the morgue not actually being Beata, DS Obasi not actually being Mal and Sue’s friendly colleague but instead investigating them, Mal and Sue themselves not actually being the trustworthy police officers they seem to be, Cloud not just being the hippie he seems (as he was also DCI Parry), The Shadow Knights quiz team actually being police officers (though still a quiz team) and not actually being as clever as they seem as they were cheating, Chris not actually having the important top-secret job he pretends to have, and also is Dominic actually quite the grieving nephew wanting to honour his uncle and aunt as he professes to be or is DS Obasi correct in thinking he is just using their story to promote his pub? And I am full of admiration at Hallett effectively giving her readers several mysteries to solve with the 2014 kidnapping storyline as well as Luke’s death and what had happened to Mal and Sue in 2019 (even though all are obviously connected), I can only imagine how complicated that was to write (though obviously she is very skilled at this, tee hee!) as I struggled a little to keep all the storylines and the threads and clues in my mind. And I like that all the loose ends have been tied up. Though I have quite enjoyed the loose ends with her other books, which has kept me speculating long after I have put the book down and indeed have caused to pick the book up again several times to flick through looking for hidden meanings that I have missed, so I guess if I’m honest I miss that a little with this book (but perhaps there were no hidden messages in her other books and my suspicion that there was, was just me being unwilling to finally put the book down!). And I don’t think there was anything really made of whether it was Mal or Sue (well, Tanya or Ian!) who was texting on the pub phone and the recipient not knowing which person it was, which is a shame as I thought that would have been a great device to use (but perhaps I was partial to it solely because I thought I had spotted something relevant, tee hee!)! And I can’t help wondering if Mal and Sue were intending to run the pub in order to be nice honest people bringing together a community or if they were planning to con money from people as they had done in the past. I know it was Tanya and Ian (as Mal and Sue) who said that they intended to do only good so we can’t really apply that intention to the original Mal and Sue (unless they had said this to Tanya and Ian when they first met in the pub carpark, before everything went wrong), and I guess I still feel a little confused with my liking of Mal and Sue as there were obviously two versions of Mal and Sue throughout the book so it’s hard to accurately judge their characters. And again, all praise to Hallett for creating such characters that I end up almost considering as real and wondering about their motives! I like Hallett’s Acknowledgements, where she says that one of the joys of pub quizzes is that it takes you away from the phone screen, and I love that she is in a pub quiz team herself and that the quizmaster at her local pub provided inspiration for some of Mal/Ian’s quizzes, as I was so full of admiration for Mal/Ian’s quiz questions and that he wrote them himself rather than copying them from a book (as I presume the quizmaster in Hallett’s local pub also does)! And I have to say that I have been encouraged to join a pub quiz team after reading this book, as it just all seems so much fun! Though I noted that we didn’t get answers to the quiz questions which were at the start of the book but I have googled them now (so I can rest!) and I see they are all the same answer (Voltaire), which is very neat as the quote at the top of the page is from Voltaire too (but perhaps other readers knew this from the start?).
I can’t wait for Hallett’s next book, The Silent Appeal, which follows the Fairway Players theatre group from her earlier books (The Appeal, and The Christmas Appeal) so I’m very excited about that! There is also her second children’s book, Death At The Museum which I’m tempted to buy as I enjoyed her first children’s book A Box Full of Murders. And the puzzle element of her books reminds me of Anthony Horowitz’s Susan Ryeland series which often has anagrams tantalisingly hidden within the text, and I am keen to read the third book in that series Marble Hall Murders. Also a mystery/killing set in a pub reminds me of The Secret of High Eldersham by Miles Burton which I read a while ago and loved, so I think I may now re-read that too. I quite like the look of The Ultimate Pub Quiz Book by Alex Harper, with my newly-discovered love of pub quizzes (and perhaps this also might aid me in the pub quiz I now attend and don’t do very well at, tee hee!).
