Game Is Murder

Hazell Ward spent years as an adult education teacher, before completing an MA in Creative Writing at Manchester Metropolitan University. She enjoyed it so much that she went on to achieve a PhD in Creative Writing. She was shortlisted for the Margery Allingham Short Story Competition in 2021 and won the CWA Short Story Dagger in 2023 for her story Cast A Long Shadow, published by Honno Press. The Game Is Murder, her debut novel, was a USA Today bestseller. She lives and works in Wrexham, North Wales, where she is currently writing her second novel.

A tour-de-force meta mystery. There are puzzles for the reader to solve, frequent authorial intrusions, dozens of sly, knowledgeable references to detective fiction classics and unexpected twists galore. I’ll freely admit I was baffled much of the time, and the last-minute reveal of the murderer was a total surprise, but Ward’s book is so captivating that I eagerly kept turning the pages