Murder in the Family Book Review

Murder in the Family

by Cara Hunter

Publisher: William Morrow, an imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers
Ginasbookreport Rating: ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️.5
Genre: Mystery / Thriller / Suspense / Murder Mystery
Read This If You Love: Janice Hallett books / Netflix documentaries

“One body. Six Experts. Can you solve the case before they do?”

Murder in the Family is mystery novel like no other. Guy Howard’s stepfather was murdered when he was a child and the case remains unsolved. Now that Guy is a film maker, he decides to enlist the help of six experts and a documentary staff to pull back the years and solve the case. What results is Infamous: Who Killed Luke Ryder…a Netflix documentary that just might unravel Guy’s entire world. Can you solve the case before the experts do? 

I’m a huge fan of mystery-based documentaries and was instantly drawn to this book when my SIL sent me a link. It didn’t disappoint! Told through news clippings, documentary scripts/interviews, and messages, Murder in the Family bucks the traditional narrative and lets the reader rely on their own attention and skills to piece everything together. While some mystery readers won’t enjoy this challenge, I found it to be a fun way to be immersed in solving the mystery. I have to believe that if Agatha Christie were writing in today’s world, she would employ some of these same approaches as Hunter and Janice Hallett. 

On a side note, this is one of the first books I annotated while reading. Thought I’d try out the trend and it led to such gems as my note realizing that just maybe the Brits use “recollections may vary” the way those in the southern United States say “bless your heart.” I couldn’t bring myself to just mark directly on the book because I wanted to pass it along without spoiling it for anyone. So I used transparent post-it notes for underlining and highlights and tagged my pages where I made the notes. 

Two last notes and two quibbles. One, I read this book in paperback, but the audiobook is a full cast of different actors (sort of like an old time radio show.) Second, Murder in the Family is also easiest to follow if you finish an entire episode section before putting the book down for the night. The quibbles…I know people from all over the states and I can’t think of a single person who says ‘reckon’ as much as this novel would have you believe. Final quibble…my eyes were dying trying to read the paperback edition’s version of the Reddit threads.