I picked this up because I loved the cover, the title and the concept. The opening was strong: dramatic, surprising and fun and I figured that I’d settle in for a fun, fast tripe-twisting read. 

And that’s what it felt like for the first third of the book. The scene was painted with deft economy. The humour and the dialogue worked. I loved that one of the characters kept quoting “The Rules Of Horror”, lore culled from decades of Horror Movies, qw q guide to what to do and not do as things got more and more weird.

I started to lose interest about the halfway mark. The initial trigger was that the pace of the story slowed down. It was nothing terrible and was It mostly done to accommodate the arrival of fresh characters and to set up the new situation Charity faces when her boss gives her new instructions. Unfortunately, the reduction in pace highlighted just how plot-driven the story was. When the plot stalled, everything stalled. I noticed that there was no character development going on. Charity grabbed my attention from the first page. She was easy to like. Yet, halfway through the book, I knew very little about her and had only a surface view of what she was feeling. 

About the same time, I started to struggle with Charity’s reactions. Charity comes across as smart and quick thinking so I found it hard to accept that it never even occurred to her that some of her team may have gone missing rather than having simply left with no notice. 

The use of the present tense didn’t help. It was fine at the start of the book when there was a lot going in. It pulled me into the story quickly and gave the action a sense of immediacy, but it’s hard to sustain and it gives a very limited view of what’s going on.

I realised that I was starting to skim and that the book had become too Scooby Doo for me, albeit with an updated and more inclusive cast of characters, 

I know that I wasn’t the target demographic for this book when I started it but I’d hoped to be carried through by its exuberance. It almost worked but I’d rather set the book aside than skim it.