West Heart Kill

The year is 1976, and listeners are tasked with solving not one but three mysterious murders at West Heart Hunting Club, an exclusive upstate New York retreat for the wealthy and wanton. McDorman makes an intriguing debut with this macabre metafiction that positions the audience as a central character, at times observing the investigation as an outsider, other times addressed directly by the narrator, and finally, as an actual presence within the narrative. Ricocheting from whodunit to howdunit to whydunit, the richly detailed roller coaster is both creative and compelling. McDorman infuses this work with a self-aware tone that yields an atmospheric and intricate listening experience. Narrator Robert Petkoff does an admirable job presenting the novel’s complex, suspenseful first-person storyline, reminiscent of Rod Serling expounding on an episode of Twilight Zone. The meandering asides and analyses, however, would be better differentiated by separate narrators.