It's pretty safe to say that I'm well within the target audience for this book, a thriller built around the work of the master of suspense, Alfred Hitchcock. I'm a film critic, after all. I haven't written a book about him yet, but there's a distinct possibility that I will in the future, and I've seen most of his films. I've certainly rated forty-four of his directorial efforts in the past couple of decades and I've reviewed a bunch. Overall, I think I'm a little shy of fifty, which is likely more than the average reader even of a novel with Hitch's name in the title.

More importantly, I know enough to bristle when his namesake in this book, Alfred Smettle, the proprietor of the Hitchcock Hotel, tells us that he used to watch all fifty-three of Hitch's films over and over with his mother, because he's a self-confessed film nerd who somehow omits the crucial nitpicky words that would have made that claim accurate, like "feature" and "extant". As late as page 255, Wrobel talks about Hitch's wife and asks, "How many moviegoers know Alma's name? I know her name and realised in the first chapter why these characters attended Reville College. If anything was just plain wrong here, I'd probably notice. I'm happy to say that it isn't.

Mostly, Wrobel does pretty well at her core task of getting the setting authentic. That's not only through giving us an Alfred Hitchcock-themed hotel with appropriate design choices, thoroughly desirable props and obvious character analogues; Alfred, for instance, is absolutely set up to be a Norman Bates clone, with all the subtext that suggests. It's also by phrasing her story in a fashion that's true to how Hitch would have done it. Now, it's not absolute, because he'd have set up less obnoxious characters, given us certain information much earlier and avoided such a monologue of an ending. However, some things ring very true indeed, down to recurrent themes like voyeurism, and the overall feel is solid.

Obviously, Hitch is the most apparent influence, as we might expect, but he isn't the only one and the other influence that leapt out for me was Cassandra Khaw's 'Nothing But Blackened Teeth'. It isn't the first book built around a reunion with secrets and danger and the likelihood of a murder, but it's a relatively close one in a number of ways. I went back to my review of that book and whole paragraphs could be copy/pasted into this one without a single change.

For one, it's a reunion period. Alfred, now that he's established his new hotel with an overt movie-related theme, has invited the clique he hung out with in college who were there when he founded and ran its Film Club. For another, they're mixed in gender, race and socioeconomic status, with all of them having moved onto success in their own ways. For a third, they're obnoxious, though not to quite the same degree. Sure, these ones bicker in vicious ways too, but they also apologise to each other the next morning when they're feeling guilty; Khaw's characters were far too self-centered for that sort of thing. Finally, there's a Big Secret, but that's arguably a given here in a thriller.

I should introduce them. Alfred's closest friend back in his Reville College days was Grace, who has become a partner in a hedge fund, as she always intended. Samira runs a female-oriented sex toy company. Julius inherited a multi-billion dollar luxury brand his grandfather had founded. Zoe is a chef who runs a New York City restaurant. TJ is the bodyguard for an important politician. They're all successes in their own way, even if they all have their secrets and there are caveats to many of their success stories.

Alfred, on the other hand, might seem successful, now that he's running the Hitchcock Hotel but it isn't going well and nobody knows where he got the money to pay for it all. Something went down during his senior year that changed everything for him, prompting him to get a job as a janitor at La Quinta and not speak to any of them for what's closing in on the two decades since. Given that, we have to ask not only how he got funding but why he would bring this group together now, for a free weekend stay with all the staff except his right hand woman Danny given time off.

Clearly he has something planned and we have to figure out what, so Wrobel drops hints here and lets us in on secrets there until we formulate guesses and then she turns everything on its head. In one way, that's not remotely unexpected because I was absolutely waiting for an unexpected turn, but it unfolds in a clever way that caught me by surprise. In fact, even after it happened, I thought I'd got it right, only to realise that I was incredibly close but completely wrong. In other words, the twist works.

As you might imagine, all this means that Wrobel builds her plot carefully. Maybe it's a little slow but it goes where it should. At dinner on the first night, conversation turns to hypotheticals and a neat question is thrown out: how would you commit the perfect murder? We know that's going to come back and bite someone in the ass later, so we pay attention to all the other details that show up and try to decide which are telegraphing something and which are red herrings. I think I'd have felt that a couple of sections might have dragged a little, if only Wrobel hadn't distracted me with props. The aviary of crows is cool, but the typewriter Joseph Stefano wrote 'Psycho' on? Suddenly, I have a wishlist of Hitch props and that's on it.

The negative side for me, beyond the monologue aspect to the ending, is probably that I saw three boxes going into this and could only check off too. As a film critic and Hitchcock fan, I wanted to see this novel free of obvious errors. That's a win for Wrobel. As a reader, I wanted to enjoy it and that works out for Wrobel as well. So far, two for two. However, as someone who fits so cleanly into the target audience for the book, I wanted it to blow me away and that's where Wrobel fell short.

Now, that isn't a big deal for me; few books blow me away and simply enjoying them is enough for most of them. However, if this particularly book didn't blow me away, then what chance is it going to have for someone who's never heard of Alfred Hitchcock or who has maybe seen a handful of his Technicolor baubles but that's about it? Just by setting a book in a Hitchcock-themed hotel means I'm giving it points before I turn to page one. Absent of big mistakes, I was always going to like this more than the average reader. So, if I merely enjoyed it, that suggests that some of those won't. ~~ Hal C F Astell