‘Everyone In The Group Chat Dies’ by L.M. Chilton

Published by Head of Zeus,
13 March 2025.
ISBN: 978-183793031-9 (PB)

Everyone In The Group Chat Dies is narrated by Clare, aka Kirby, Cornell whom we first meet as she clears up the previous night’s debris at the ‘SUNKISSED AND SINGLE’ resort in Magaluf.  Kirby’s job is tedious but, she thinks, it’s a small price to pay for anonymity and there are far worse places to escape the past than under the blue skies of Majorca.  Then a WhatsApp message arrives and with it is the bad thing she wants to forget. 

Suddenly it is a year earlier when Kirby was an aspiring journalist for a local newspaper and shared a flat with Dave, Dylan and Seema in the sleepy village of Crowhurst.  The four flatmates are an unlikely group of friends drifting towards thirty but living like students and having not-quite-made-it-in-life-thus-far.  Their group chat name, The Deadbeats, is an appropriate soubriquet for the four pals and when a young woman, Esme, knocks on their front door, they are a little put out that their predictable Thursday has been disturbed.  The newcomer explains that she’s a temporary lodger and the quartet assume that ‘Creepy Frank,’ the landlord they detest, has decided to employ the tiny box room to squeeze yet more money from the run down property.  They invite Esme to make herself at home and then to join them for an evening at the local pub, where her relative youth and go-getting approach to life soon challenges The Deadbeats inertia.  She has amassed a large following by investigating cold cases on a trendy social media app, ShowMe and has come to Crowhurst to delve into an evil event from thirty years earlier when five teenagers were murdered during Crowhurst’s annual Crawe Fayre.  The killer was believed to have taken his own life, but Esme thinks otherwise.  She has come on the eve of the annual event to pursue her theory whilst live streaming her findings to her online followers.  Kirby is fascinated by Esme’s success as an independent investigative journalist.  She’s also piqued; her latest assignment is to write about the proliferation of potholes in the local area!  The two women join forces in their search for the truth.  What happens next surprises everyone…

Kirby’s first person narrative imbues the novel with a sense of immediacy as well as being witty.  Prose is frequently interrupted by short, sharp text messages zinging between the flatmates.  This enhances the pace of the plot as well as discombobulating the characters.  This disorder is mirrored in the recurrent time shifts between past and present as Kirby tries to make sense of past atrocities and an unfolding mystery.  Gothic tropes abound; they unsettle and deceive the twenty first century narrator as well as those around her. 

In Everyone In The Group Chat Dies, L.M. Chilton successfully fuses sinister crime and comedy in a contemporary setting.  A great read and highly recommended.
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Reviewer: Dot Marshall-Gent

L.M. Chilton is a journalist with fifteen years’ experience working on TV shows for the BBC, ITV and Channel 4 in the UK, as well as writing columns for magazines such as Cosmopolitan and Glamour, and reporting for national newspapers across the world, everywhere from Doncaster to Delhi. He lives in London, thinking of twists for murder mysteries while practising the banjo, much to the annoyance of his neighbours.  Don't Swipe Right, his debut novel, was published by Head of Zeus in 2023.  

Dot Marshall-Gent worked in the emergency services for twenty years first as a police officer, then as a paramedic and finally as a fire control officer before graduating from King’s College, London as a teacher of English in her mid-forties.  She completed a M.A. in Special and Inclusive Education at the Institute of Education, London and now teaches part-time and writes mainly about educational issues.  Dot sings jazz and country music and plays guitar, banjo and piano as well as being addicted to reading mystery and crime fiction.