The Murder Game

The Murder Game is a legal/thriller novel written over 10 years ago by Catherine McKenzie. Although it remained unpublished for all of those years, the book itself was featured in McKenzie’s 2016 novel: Fractured and inspired much of the storyline. Shortly after the release of Fractured, McKenzie self-published The Murder Game under the pen name: Julie Apple (who was noted as the book’s author in Fractured). If you are not familiar with either of these novels, I’m sure this sounds confusing, but trust me…it was such a clever move on McKenzie’s part.

The Murder Game offers alternating time frames that allows readers to follow a set of characters back and forth from their social/learning time in law school to their professional roles in the courtroom. Personally, I didn’t think that some of these characters’ roles in legal proceedings were ethical or realistic because of their known histories together but it was entertaining nonetheless to follow the same characters throughout the entirety of the book. All the legal what-if scenarios processed by the characters in The Murder Game kept my brain active and thinking so this book was a win-win in terms of being an entertaining brain-teaser of sorts. Check it out! Catherine McKenzie (aka Julie Apple) is a rock star!

Oh my god this book it sent me on a rollercoaster whirlwind honestly I have so many mixed feelings for this book but it was amazing that is for sure! I have never read anything like this the story took me in so many different directions and I for sure did not guess the ending. I didn’t even see it coming, it slapped me in the face. I was guessing until the very last page and even then I still didn’t guess it right.

The author’s writing is so easy to read this book was not an easy read your brain has to be switched on and you have to actively read a story like this. But the writing of this it was easy to read I didn’t struggle. I liked how the novel was set out in 3 parts and even then it was going back and forth from when the characters were in law school to the present when the case was in court. I could totally tell that the author had done her research there was nothing in this that made me believe it was so far fetched and I loved how it was researched it just made this story even that more enjoyable.

Now I look at it I really should have guessed what was going to happen by the name of this book like it’s kind of obvious now I think about it but I didn’t. As I say this book you are thrown from direction to direction and it was truly amazing how it was done. Once you thought for definite the story was going in one direction it would turn and go in a different direction it was honestly done so well that even when there was a no twist or turn it wasn’t annoying. It wasn’t like “oh my not another” it just worked. The way information is delivered in this story too is nice there is no information dumping and we learn things when we need to know them not a moment before or a moment after.

I only had one problem with this book and that was I didn’t feel like we had gotten the full story out of Jonathon and Meredith’s relationship we learned bits and pieces but we never learn the full story. At least I didn’t manage to get the full story from them which was really sort of frustrating because I wanted to know more about these character dynamics and I didn’t get that from this.

What was good was how complex each of these characters were Meredith, Lily, Jonathon and Julian there was so much more to them than what we saw and I really liked the characters, it’s been a while since I have read characters as good as these and I am glad that I did read this book because it was interesting how we learned about each of these characters.