AK Benedict
Simon & Shuster, 13 February 2025
Available as: HB, 367, audio, e
Source: Advance copy
ISBN(HB): 9781398519879
I'm grateful to Anne at Random Things Tours for sending me a copy of Little Red Death to consider for review, and for inviting me to join the book's blogtour.
(If you think I'm being slightly oblique in this review, it's necessary because of what this book is and no, I can't explain that, for spoiler related reasons but I hope you will read the book and then conclude that my review makes more sense).
AK Benedict's latest is a crime novel, and a puzzle novel, and also a novel about writers and writing, and it's about friendship and childhood and loss and... this is difficult to put into words... I suppose it's about the essence of what a crime novel is?
Most of all though, it's a superb read.
It's a crime novel, in that we meet DI Lyla Rondell, an efficient and driven young detective taking the lead on her first murder enquiry when a young woman is kidnapped and murdered.
It's a puzzle, in that, like Benedict's recent Christmas novels, there's a game to play here, a contest between writer and reader.
It's about friendship, because Lyla has a deep hurt, relating to her childhood friend Allison. Lyla's childhood matters, both because, for a mere character on a page, Benedict makes Lyla real, motivated and true and her childhood is part of that.
Loss, because, yes, loss.
That death in the woods is only the first. The book features a series of murders which are inspired by fairy stories. There is a Wolf. There are woods. There is also a woman imprisoned, made to perform an impossible task, trying to spin straw into gold, as it were, to save her life and maybe, earn her freedom. Her plight takes us into the essential dilemma of this story. Crime as entertainment. Cosy crime. Murder on demand. How does that even work, ethically? Are we, as readers, not just clients, commissioning our hit -men and -women authors to off victims simply for our pleasure and amusement? (As an aside, when did "crime" fiction become murder fiction?)
The question is especially piquant here because of the situation that author KT Hexen is in, writing death scenes which will then be enacted by a serial killer. Is she somehow responsible? How far should she cooperate with a killer? At what point do you, dear reader, at what point do I, have to accept that some of the blood is on your - or my - own hands?
As the layers of the story build up - the forensic investigation, the pressure from the boss, the prurient Press, the leaks from the enquiry, the taunting notes from the killer - that moral greyness spreads, because we're also seeing things from another perspective, as it were, we're reading messages. The messages keep getting clearer, perhaps, but will we, at the end of the story, still be dancing in the dark?
This is a story that, to succeed, has to function at several different levels. It needs to be a good police procedural. It needs to make us fear for the next death. It needs to make us love Lyla. And above all, it needs to work properly in retrospect, when, so to speak, the curtain is pulled aside and we see what's happening. And all that without any jarring effect, any suspicion that things are off. Benedict achieves all this and more creating something rather different, eminently readable, and also fun. (The Author, in her endnote, does refer to a trail of breadcrumbs, and I think I spotted these, it's almost as if she left consecrated bread throughout the book, but I don't count those as a jarring element at all, they have a purpose here in terms of what's going on).
Strongly recommended.
For more information about Little Red Death, see the publisher's website here - and of course the other stops on the blogtour which you can see listed on the poster below.
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