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The story is ridiculous, the couples completely unconvincing. I heard Hannah talking about it on the radio and even as she described the story I felt she was struggling to sell the premise. She also spoke about how she made a detailed plan of the resort, writing out a map and everything. It didn't work. I couldn't picture this so-called luxury resort at all. I just kept picturing a large grim Edwardian house surrounded by caravans. Not, I think, what she was going for. Alas, this was not the book for me. However, I will gladly read the next Sophie Hannah book in the hopes that it is a great one!
All the couples at this small, exclusive resort have secrets, some major, some minor. All but one couple lie, but even they conceal things from each other. And some of them are better at lying than others.So who might be trying to warn you? And who might be about to kill you, and seems certain to get away with it? BY FAR Sophie Hannah’s best one yet. Relatable, funny, high concept and so satisfying I watched in awe as the pieces fell into place’ GILLIAN McALLISTER I also am very fond of the Culver Valley series. But oh, dear this was AWFUL! I had to force myself to finish it. Someone is murdered while on holiday and receives a warning letter prior to the murder telling her to “Beware of the couple at the table nearest to yours”. A confusing warning given that all the tables are the same distance apart. Also why would someone send a warning letter without telling them all the information. The suspect group dynamic is truly excellent, this author is the queen of the quirky, oddly compelling character and this time there's a whole lot of them, all caught up in a case that even Simon struggles to solve.
As I read The Couple at the Table, I got the feeling that it started life as a plot for one of Hannah’s Poirot novels. From the exclusive resort, to the class divisions between the various guests. And the most telling due? “The Gathering.” I can’t think of a modern police procedural where the lead investigator gathers all the suspects in a room and talks at them for a period of time. It almost feels as if DC Waterhouse, DS Zailer and the rest of the team were shoe-horned in at a later date, leaving the story feeling somewhat disjointed in places. Six couples are seated for dinner at six different tables an equal distance away from the others. One of the couples receives a note stating that they should beware of the couple seated the nearest to them. Who could they mean? When a death follows the note's arrival it seems that its contents were truthful and the race in discovering who the sender is and who they were referring to is on. The Lucy narrator was hilariously deranged but not in a good way and the victim, Jane, sounded like a badly drawn Cruella De Vil. The whole 'letter to a murderer' thing was badly judged (and repeated twice). This was presumably so the reader could read through to find the clues, but I couldn't be arsed.
Overall, it’s very mixed bag for me some parts are fantastic and others are just let’s board the train to Crazy Town. It’s a shame because I usually really enjoy Sophie Hannah’s books but this one wasn’t her best 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.
THE AUTHOR: Sophie Hannah (born 1971) is a British poet and novelist. From 1997 to 1999 she was Fellow Commoner in Creative Arts at Trinity College, Cambridge and between 1999 and 2001 a junior research fellow of Wolfson College, Oxford. She lives with her husband and two children in Cambridge. (Wikipedia) I guessed the killer at around 16-18% of the way in and figured I had a pretty good idea of their goal (I was right). All is not revealed until pretty far into the final third and let me just say, it wasn't worth all that preceded between the two. Overall a tedious overlong read with characters who were just a muddled, ridiculous mess that wasn't even memorable. I did get through it in two days through sheer disbelief that it wasn't getting better.Next, Sophie takes you through the case which is being investigated by DC Simon Waterhouse (the best detective in crime writing IMO). Simon is not a charismatic, loveable, rogue detective. He is miserable, introverted and dislikes people in general, but more than anything he does not let anything go as we can see when this murder is still unsolved after six months. OK, so it's a closed room murder - someone died - every possible suspect ruled out yada yada. Here we go, let's settle in to see how this unfurls. When someone, however, is discovered dead within hours of dinner, it appears the threats weren’t empty after all. To top off the oddness surrounding the case, it becomes evident to the police that no one from outside could have committed the murder and all of the guests have alibis. This leaves the detectives spinning their wheels as they try to figure out the impossible. Who is the murderer? And are the remaining guests potential victims or perpetrators?
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