SIX COUPLES. ONE LUXURY RESORT. AND THE PERFECT MURDER . . .

You’re on your honeymoon at an exclusive couples-only resort.

You receive a note warning you to ‘Beware of the couple at the table nearest to yours’. At dinner that night, five other couples are present, and none of their tables is any nearer or further away than any of the others. It’s as if someone has set the scene in order to make the warning note meaningless – but why would anyone do that?

You have no idea.

You also don’t know that you’re about to be murdered, or that once you’re dead, all the evidence will suggest that no one there that night could possibly have committed the crime.

So who might be trying to warn you? And who might be about to commit the perfect murder?

The Couple at the Table reads like an old-fashioned murder mystery and a psychological thriller rolled into one. The plot is simple in terms of the murder, however, the investigation and the toing and froing between the characters and timeline make sure you have to read the book slowly and take everything in as at times it comes across as a little confusing.

The pacing of the book felt quite slowly at the beginning as we are introduced to the twelve characters who were staying at the exclusive couples-only resort the night that one of them is murdered, stabbed in the back whilst her husband was in the same room and saw nothing.

In the second half of the book the pace intensified as the case starts to close in, though I did not suspect who admitted to the killing and by the end, I was unsure if this person was the real killer or just taking the fall, that’s how much it plays with your mind.

It most certainly is an intriguing book and if you like your plots to go over the same scene from numerous points of view then you will love this novel. Especially if you adore books with plenty of characters that will get on your nerves and have narcissistic qualities. These characters really grated on me after a while, which I find is the making of a good story, when I become emotionally invested and either love or hate the characters.

Overall, if you like to be led astray a few times, like your books a little bit wacky and unusual but adore a murder mystery, then The Couple at the Table is the book for you.

Sophie Hannah is an internationally bestselling writer of psychological crime fiction, published in 27 countries. In 2013, her latest novel, The Carrier, won the Crime Thriller of the Year Award at the Specsavers National Book Awards. Two of Sophie’s crime novels, The Point of Rescue and The Other Half Lives, have been adapted for television and appeared on ITV1 under the series title Case Sensitive in 2011 and 2012. In 2004, Sophie won first prize in the Daphne Du Maurier Festival Short Story Competition for her suspense story The Octopus Nest, which is now published in her first collection of short stories, The Fantastic Book of Everybody’s Secrets.

Sophie has also published five collections of poetry. Her fifth, Pessimism for Beginners, was shortlisted for the 2007 T S Eliot Award. Her poetry is studied at GCSE, A-level and degree level across the UK. From 1997 to 1999 she was Fellow Commoner in Creative Arts at Trinity College, Cambridge, and between 1999 and 2001 she was a fellow of Wolfson College, Oxford. She is forty-one and lives with her husband and children in Cambridge, where she is a Fellow Commoner at Lucy Cavendish College. She is currently working on a new challenge for the little grey cells of Hercule Poirot, Agatha Christie’s famous detective.