The Saw franchise might have jumped the shark many sequels ago, but luckily for those of us who are suckers for this kind of set-piece story, we now have Simon Kernick’s new thriller, You All Die Tonight (Headline). Our setting: a remote mansion in the Essex countryside. Our cast: seven people, who wake from a drugged sleep to find themselves in said mansion. As they meet, they discover they do, in fact, know one another – they are all linked in some way to the Black Lake massacre, which took place four years earlier and is “one of this country’s most heinous unsolved crimes”. There’s the disgraced police officer who failed to solve the case, the brother of one of the victims; the victim’s business partner… you get the picture. Then a disembodied voice speaks to let them know they have all been injected “with a slow-acting poison… an extremely rare combination of chemicals that will be very hard to detect, and therefore to treat medically”. Basically: find out who did it, or die. “If you’re innocent, you need to find out who committed this crime. If you’re guilty, your only chance of a quick death is to unburden yourself,” they’re told. Cue a jumping back and forth in time as we circle in on our killers – it might not be as grisly as Saw, but this is an enjoyably preposterous set-up, with a gratifyingly grimy bunch of suspects.
