As you probably know, I love locked room mysteries. Actually, I love the subversion of the genre rather than the thing itself. I’m up for an Agatha Christie tale anytime, but what really gets my blood boiling is when someone takes Christie’s designs and bends them into something…different. It’s probably the postmodernist in me. The mystery and thriller genre doesn’t have enough ancestral tinkering, as I’ve said on this blog many times; too often writers fall back on the safe, the tried, those old tropes and ideas that have been used a thousand times. But sometimes you do see a very nice twist to an old genre and a book that really tries to do something bold and new. I’m reading two pseudo locked room tales right now, Tana French’s The Likeness and Jincy Willett’s The Writing Class. I really like Willett’s book because it’s fresh, new, funny–and it takes those age-old concepts that are so prevalent in Agatha Christie and Dorothy Sayers and twists them into something almost recognizable. The locked room is a perfect set-up for a whodunit for obvious reasons, and in this novel Willett uses that old framework in such audacious ways, it’s almost as if she’s imagining a completely new genre.