Review: Black Lake Manor by Guy Morpuss

As you might be able to tell from its cover, Guy Morpuss’s second book, Black Lake Manor, owes something of a debt to Agatha Christie. But don’t be fooled by the aesthetic. This is far from your group of wealthy potential murderers in a remote house, clutching pearls and slinging insults and martinis. Black Lake Manor is a thoroughly (post)modern affair.

At his remote manor house on Vancouver Island, tech giant CEO Lincoln Shar holds a party to announce his new product, hardlight ‘ghosts’ that allow the user an immersive experience that gives them a physical presence wherever they want. When the power goes, it turns out that only a handful of guests are physically present, which severely limits the pool of suspects when Lincoln is murdered in the night – or does it? Mixing a classic locked-room murder mystery with time travel, futuristic tech, and Native American lore, Black Lake Manor will have your head spinning with red herrings before reaching a thoroughly satisfying conclusion.

Those who enjoyed Morpuss’s first book, Five Minds, will know that the author likes to keep the reader guessing. In that book he destabilised the reader with multiple minds living in the same body – a body that might have committed a crime, even if most of the minds inside knew nothing about it. Here he does similar things with time travel, layering potential suspects on top of each other in a way that will have you flipping back and forth to double check which timelines match.

In addition to the ‘present’s’ skimming through time, there is an additional narrative set on the same spit of land, describing the establishment of fictional Native American tribe, the Akhat. But again, things are not quite what they seem, and again, Morpuss likes to keep the reader guessing to the very end.

Black Lake Manor is the perfect gift for anyone who wants that original Agatha Christie feel with a layer of twenty-first-century technology muddying the waters. A complex mystery with traditional values and motives, but with some of the weirdness and wonder that comes with near-future settings .