Review - 'The Wasp Trap' by Mark Edwards

I'm normally a huge sucker for locked-room mysteries, but The Wasp Trap didn't quite do it for me.

Based on the sheer number of famous authors who blurbed for this book—Lisa Jewell, Ruth Ware, Alex Michaelides, Steve Cavanagh—you'd think this would be the best thing since sliced bread. So I settled in for what I assumed would be the mystery/thriller of the year, and let me tell you, the disappointment was real.

From almost the very first page, it felt like I was being sold a story instead of shown one. The characters in here, their interactions, the dialogue, all of it just wafted of inauthenticity. Real people don't behave like this, they don't talk like this, they wouldn't react like this. And so slow but surely, this slightly awkward and stilted representation sucked away any semblance of reality from the tale.

It is blatantly clear that every element in here exists solely to manipulate the story into revealing a predefined set of twists. And while I like a good twist as much as the next mystery-loving gal, the twists cannot be the only glue holding a story together.

It becomes a problem if the characters and the rest of the plot are relegated to such secondary nonimportance, I find it hard to even care. All the characters feel interchangeable, so what happens to one might as well be happening to another, for whatever is the difference? So much crazy stuff occurs in this story, yet my reaction to each and every single one is a shrug of indifference.

Even the premise in which this whole mystery is based upon—the dating app and the wasp test—did not ring true. There was no way such a generic app would've made anyone rich and the test is of such dubious moral and ethical ground, not to mention unsound science, it came across as a bunch of handwaving hocus pocus more than the gospel it was taken to be.

Also, I can't tell you how much I disliked our narrator Will. He is sniveling, meek, and paranoid, probably the most unappealing combination in a character ever. He spent the entire time (in both timelines) lusting after Sophie, expecting it to be reciprocated simply because he stared at her long enough. It honestly creeped me out. I really thought (spoiler: the twist was that Will was the psychopath, but alas, the test did not oblige).

I'll give this some stars for the twists, but as a whole, the story was pretty middling.

Readaroo Rating: 3 stars