Sue and Mal Eastwood are living out a second career as proprietors of The Case Is Altered, a struggling, off-the-beaten-path pub. The only thing that's really helping them thrive is a weekly pub quiz, with bespoke questions created by quizmaster Mal (none of those "from a book" questions for him!). Business seems to be improving until a body turns up in the nearby canal, and it's a man who had been kicked out of the pub quiz earlier that evening. Around the same time, a mysterious new trivia team shows up and starts beating the locals EVERY TIME with nearly perfect scores, baffling Sue and Mal and frustrating the other teams to no end. So there are two mysteries here — who killed the guy in the canal and how the heck is this new team winning??
Told in a modern epistolary style — emails, texts, transcripts of interviews and recordings — and presented as a pitch for a Netflix true crime documentary series, this is a fast-moving book that doesn't necessarily follow a linear timeline. Rather, it pops back in time to give more details the same way that one of those, well, Neflix true crime documentaries does. There are definitely some elements that didn't work for me (why did the conversations between spouses have to be via text?) and the final twist didn't seem to have a whole lot of clues leading up to it, but overall it was a lot of fun.
