They say blood is thicker than water. I say blood is just harder to wash off your hands.
My name’s Kimberley. I’m twenty-five. I have epilepsy, a seizure alert dog named Muffin, and a job I love as a senior housekeeper in one of London’s top hotels. I’m used to being invisible. Overlooked. Safe.
But that was before Jennifer Clifton checked in. She’s rich, powerful, terrifyingly calm — and she asks for me by name.
She offers me my dream job, working in her exclusive hotel in the Scottish Highlands. It’s more money than I ever imagined.
There’s just one catch: Don’t open the door to Room 21.
How hard can that be?
But something is wrong in this hotel. The guests give me the creeps. The staff whisper behind closed doors. And that room — the one I promised not to enter — calls to me.
I took this job for a better life. Now I’m trapped in a nightmare

It’s rare that I get to the end of a book and think, “I wish I hadn’t bothered finishing that.” These days, if a book isn’t working for me, I set it aside and read something else.

So why did I finish ‘Room 21‘? I blame it on my curiosity and my misguided belief that it would all be worth it in the end.

I almost set the book aside at the end of the first chapter because the writing was so bland and so full of clichés. It didn’t help that the book started with the kind of prologue I hate. The sort that’s a preview of what will happen towards the end of the book, that’s inserted as a promise to the reader that things will get exciting and bloody later on. The first chapter then gave a first-person account, introducing our heroine, Kimberly. The way she expressed herself was tediously predictable. I knew I couldn’t spend the entire book inside her head, listening to her trite commentary, 

Fortunately, each of the two next chapters was told from the point of view of different women: Jennifer, the rich woman with a secret agenda; and Emily, whose account is on an earlier timeline and who, it is strongly inferred, is Kimberley’s mother. The puzzle and the variety they presented encouraged me to keep going

Then the plot got its hooks into me. I wanted to know what happened in Room 21 and how it linked Kimberly, Jennifer and Emily.

Yes, I noticed that the writing didn’t get any better and that the three women all sounded the same but I ignored all that in order to find out what was going on.

The plot became less and less plausible with every page, but somehow that didn’t reduce my curiosity about where the book was going. By the seventy per cent mark, the plot twists were coming thick and fast. Each one is less likely than the last, and yet they kept me turning the pages to find out how it would all end.

I finally tired of being dragged along by my overstimulated curiosity when I was presented with a plot twist centred around who Jennifer really was. It was too much for me to swallow. It made me feel I was being played with, or perhaps invited to play. Except the game was all about violence, rape, murder and revenge and I wasn’t having fun with it.

I spent the last fifteen per cent of the book in one of those Macbeth moments,

"I am in blood 
Stepp’d in so far that, should I wade no more, 
Returning were as tedious as go o’er."

So I finished it.

And yes, there were plot twists all the way through to the final page.

By which time, I had long ceased caring.

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