The Sunday Mail
WHEN you take two established writers and put them between the same book covers, things can go either way.
Their writing styles might clash and their ideas may be involved in a messy battle for supremacy resulting in an incoherent script.
Or, like James Patterson and David Ellis do in “The Murder House”, the outcome could be mind-blowing.
The combination of the world’s number one best selling author Patterson, and award-winning writer Ellis has already produced four blockbuster novels.
“The Murder House” is the most recent one, and the title alone is enough to raise the curiosity of fiction fans.
While I have always been a Patterson fan, I had not read Ellis’s work until I came across “The Hidden Man” about two years ago.
“The Murder House” is one of those books that gives you goose bumps with its chilling storyline that takes you on an investigative journey as the protagonist, Detective Jenna Murphy, tries to uncover shocking secrets surrounding an estate in the Hamptons.
The house at number 7 Ocean Drive is a gorgeous, multi-million-dollar beachfront estate with a horrific past, associated with a series of depraved killings that have never been solved.
“His eyes invariably move to the house by the ocean, perched up on the hill, the haunted mansion that, even from a distance, scowls at him. ‘No one ever leaves alive the house at 7 Ocean Drive’. A shiver runs through him,” goes a paragraph which describes how people in the Hamptons felt about this house.
Neglected, empty and rumoured to be cursed, it is known as The Murder House and locals keep their distance.
Det Murphy used to consider herself a local, but she has not been around for a while having pursued a career as a cop in New York City. But she is now back as she tries to escape her troubled past and rehabilitate a career on the rocks.
She hardly expects her lush and wealthy surroundings to be a hotbed of grisly depravity until a Hollywood power broker and his mistress are found dead in The Murder House.
What seems like a simple case leading to the arrest of construction worker Noah Walker quickly unravels as the dead bodies keep piling and the community appears intent on obscuring the truth.
This is a brilliant book that even an uncommitted reader can finish in three or four sittings because of its absorbing pace.
