The Killer Question

By Janice Hallett
** Publication Date 23 September 2025 **
​4 stars


Pub quizzes are popular everywhere. Whether it’s trivia night in your hometown, or Jeopardy every evening on TV, people love to test their knowledge. 


Off the beaten path is a rural pub called The Case is Altered. Sue and Mal Eastwood took over and began their second careers when the pub was closed. Mal was an avid quizzer, and his goal was to make the pub a success once again. 


The pub seems to be doing splendidly, with a Monday quiz that has gathered five regular teams. There is one team that wins regularly, but not by much. After a night when a new team has been expelled by Mal for being known cheaters on the pub circuit, a body is found drowned in the nearby river. 


Shortly thereafter a new team starts showing up weekly. This new team can beat the pants off all the regular teams. It appears that they must be cheating, but both Mal and Sue have watched, and if they are, no one can tell. The team visits all the other pubs on the circuit, winning those as well. 


Mal and Sue have a secret related to their first careers, and they hope that this quiz team has nothing to do with that. After all, this was supposed to be their retirement. 


When their nephew Dominic reaches out to an agency to ask them if they’d be interested in doing a documentary about the pub, the agency wonders why they’d want to do such a thing. But Dominic is determined and begins passing along information about the pub and the mystery surrounding Sue and Mal Eastwood, and that final quiz night. 


Written in a semi-epistolary style, this novel was actually quite fun. It did seem to go on and on, but a lot of the story was necessary to piece together the mystery. When we realize that Dominic is writing to another person to inform them of the story, and that it is to be a multi-episode documentary, it does make sense that there would be a lot of backstory. 


There is a lot of character development, and a lot of characters when you take the pub owners plus their previous coworkers, plus the quiz teams. There is a lot of text and email dialogue for each of the characters and the quiz teams. Then there are the actual scenes with people conversing. It is a lot. With that said, it is really well written. It is very enjoyable, even though I would consider it a slow read. 


Consider this one a Sunday drive. Nothing to rush through. Take it slow and enjoy the ride.