On Christmas Day, a group of men and women are invited to stay at Raven's Reach and offered a tantalizing reward in exchange for staying at the plush mansion for twenty-four hours. Although none of them can exactly afford to miss out on the million dollars on offer, not all of the guests are there of their own free will, and not all of them will make it out of Raven's Reach alive.
Invitation to Death is a bit of a slow burn, but one that grows increasingly interesting by degrees, and Bryan Smith's premise has a number of unique angles to it. In some ways, it has the promise of a locked-room mystery, but Smith sacrifices any pretense of a mystery by cluing readers - but not the characters - in on the real scoop, before twisting things even further and going all-in on the mayhem. Imagine Knives Out turning into Slaughter Higher and you'll have an inkling of what to expect here.
Smith delivers a few tantalizing ideas toward the hidden captors motivations, but there's just something about this book as a whole that doesn't quite congeal. There's a few too many disparate elements that never quite connect in this planned-yet-random plot, including a fairly large cast of characters that are never truly developed in this slim story except to know that none of them are truly redeemable or worth rooting for.
Invitation to Death is also oddly paced, with the entire first third of the book devoted to introducing all these various characters as they arrive at Raven's Reach, and then another twenty percent of the book becomes devoted to getting them all into the same room. It's plodding and, at times, frustrating in its repetitious nature and lack of real forward momentum, and then, bang!, it's a sudden and frenetic race to the finish.
A lot of Smith's latest feels half-baked, but it does at least have a few moments of intrigue, even as the promise of a much more interesting story than what's actually presented here lurks beneath the surface, frustratingly disconnected from central narrative. Smith does deliver a few shocking kills in pretty glorious fashion and they present some welcome jolts in an otherwise uneven narrative. Unfortunately, they never amount to more than jump scares given how little we care about the victims or the motivations of the victimizer.
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