For August, we chose the book The Killer Question by Janice Hallett. This was named a Most Anticipated Book of Fall by The New York Times, LitHub, BookBub, Goodreads, and others - and we were excited to see if it was worth the hype!
We were happy to read another mystery that takes place in England, but were especially eager for the pub trivia setting. Our book club already has some die-hard trivia fans (pun intended!), so we loved this setup. We didn’t anticipate the format of the book, consisting of text messages, emails, and legal documents, but that made piecing together the mystery within a book even more unique.
Book
The Killer Question by Janice Hallett
Description:
Janice Hallett, “the new queen of crime” (Electric Literature), returns with a fresh, edge-of-your-seat mystery that takes place at a pub’s weekly trivia night, revealed through quiz categories, phone messages, and email correspondence.
Sue and Mal Eastwood run an isolated rural pub called The Case is Altered where a weekly trivia game has revived its flagging fortunes—that is, until a body is found in the nearby river. Soon after, a mysterious new team arrives and shakes up the diverse field of regulars by scoring top marks in every round...every week.
Meanwhile, Sue and Mal have a secret of their own. Before arriving here, they were caught up in a secret police operation which meant they had to leave town—and whatever happened back then seems to have finally caught up with them.
Five years later, the pub lies derelict, and their nephew Dominic is determined to make a documentary about their story. What happened at this unassuming pub? And can a single question really kill?
Club
Snack suggestions:
We suggest leaning into a pub theme and serving snacks that you might have at the bar!
Examples include:
Fish & chips
Mozzarella sticks
Loaded potato skins
Chicken wings
French fries
Seasonal veggies
Simple desserts like brownies
Check out Cozy Crimes’ book club questions that can be used for any mystery.
Here are our questions targeted to The Killer Question:
1. How did the format of the book affect your reading of it? Did you like piecing the story together from the messages and documents?
2. How did this format influence the story? Would it work in other formats (besides a book)? What do you think the Netflix True Crime version would look like?
3. Which characters did you relate to the most? Who did you have sympathy for? Who were you suspicious of?
4. Why was pub trivia so important to the characters?
5. Did you know any of the trivia questions? Was it fun to “play along” as well as “sleuth”?
6. This was not a traditional whodunit. How did you like this approach? What was your journey as a reader?
7. How did characters’ ulterior motives and secrets come into play?
8. What did you think of the two time periods and crimes within the book that Sue & Mal were a part of?
9. How did all of the storylines come together at the climax?
10. How did the settings affect the story? Which bar and trivia game would you most like to visit and play?
Optional Activity:
With how often they were featured within the pages, why not play a trivia game of your own!
You can select a preexisting app or game like Trivial Pursuit or create your own. What we did, which worked very well, was have each book club member bring one round of questions to the event. Everyone would host one round and be able to play all the others. If there are six book club members, then they would all host one round and play five rounds. (If you have a large group, you can also play in pairs or in groups.)
They could choose any topic they wanted! (Here’s the tricky fictional mysteries trivia round that we started off with.) It could be “General Knowledge” or a niche topic that your friends might enjoy.
We had one rule about structure, which was that each host had to make it so players could earn up to 10 points per round. That kept things even so there was always the same amount of potential points per round.
There were lots of interpretations for how this was enacted. We had one round where ten questions were each worth one point each, one round where you could rank/bet your most confident guesses, one round similar to Jeopardy, and one where there was only one question with 10 answers. We even had someone come up with a mini game of trivia sabotage where picking from a hat made how you answered more difficult.
No matter your approach, you’re sure to have a fun time playing trivia after you discuss the book!
