Ink Ribbon Red
ISBN: 9780241433584
Description
Six friends gather at a country house for a birthday weekend. They decide to play a game. All six names go in a hat. Choose two, and imagine one murdering the other. Write it down. Type it up. Read it out. Points are given for making the murders sound convincing. Of course, when given such a task, it’s only natural to use what you know. Secrets. Grudges. Affairs. But once you’ve put it in a story, that secret is out. So with each fictional murder, someone gets a motive for a real one. Which leads to the most important question: When a real murder comes, will you be able to spot it in time?
Reviewed on 10th November 2024
I was a bit concerned going into Alex Pavesi’s second novel - the first had such a clever structure to it and I wasn’t sure how this would avoid feeling like a copy or just becoming a regular novel. But it’s managed with amazing talent to create a really addictive reading experience.
It’s a story of six friends who come together for a weekend in 1999, and write stories about each other murdering other members of the group. But everything is presented together - truth and stories - in a non-chronological order, so the reader has to try to work out step by step what’s real and what’s the stories within the story.
This means that some scenes do end up seeming fairly brutal, but for the most part I just wanted to keep on reading to find out what was actually going on and try to gradually lift the curtain bit by bit.
A properly enjoyable read, but probably one best read fairly quickly to avoid having forgotten details as you go.
