Description from Amazon:
One house. Ten contestants. Thirty cameras.
Forty microphones.
Yet again the public gorges its voyeuristic appetite as another group of
unknown and unremarkable people submit themselves to the brutal exposure of the
televised real-life soap opera, House Arrest.
Everybody knows the rules: total strangers are forced to live together while
the rest of the country watches them do it. Who will crack first? Who will have
sex with whom? Who will the public love and who will they hate? All the usual
questions. And then, suddenly, there are some new ones.
Who is the murderer? How did he or she manage to kill under the constant gaze
of the thirty television cameras? Why did they do it? And who will be next?
I really wanted to love this as I’ve found
some of his other books funny and this plot sounded good. But honestly, it was
a slog to read it. I kept going just to find out who the murderer was.
It’s basically Big Brother with a murder
and you’ve got the police looking at all the footage of the show that was not
aired, trying to figure out what happened. Reading it thus is two timelines as
you have the police watching it now, with what is happening in the house on the
recordings in the past. However, the rest of the cast are still in the house as
the show went on even after the murder.
What’s frustrating is you don’t find out
who was murdered until quite far into the book, and unless you are open to some
crude language and actions this one is not for you. Picture a bunch of drunk
people naked stuck tightly in a hot box together for four hours in the dark and
what they could get up to.
When the murderer is caught it’s a proper “raise
your eyebrows” moment because it’s quite a lot to swallow. The edited footage
also goes to show what gets manipulated for the public but to have the reader
buy into what happened takes it a bit too far.
The characters themselves are all unlikable
and their dialogue childish. This could have been done so well but it feels
like a good plot wasted.
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