Blending closed circle Agatha Christie style murder mystery and horror in a quasi-steampunk setting, Murder at Spindle Manor follows huntress Isabeau Agarwal as she tracks a dangerous quarry to the isolated Spindle Manor. Isabeau knows one of the ten guests staying at the manor must be her target but since it can assume the shape and memories of any person it consumes, she'll only have until morning to find out who it's pretending to be. And if she fails, the citizens of the nearby city of Lamplight will pay the price for her failure.

As someone who loves closed circle mysteries (particularly those done in a similar style to Christie) and whose favorite movies include both Clue and The Thing, I was super excited when I saw the synopsis for this one. It sounded so much like my kind of book! Unfortunately, it was mostly a miss for me. There were the bones of a story that could have been really fun but there's just way too many elements in here to focus on any one thing and it took away from the tension and my investment in the mystery.

The first half of the story has Isabeau meeting and interviewing each of the guests and it starts to feel somewhat tense as you learn that some of the guests are actually kind of terrible people. I liked the slow build of the atmosphere and the relationships between the characters. The steampunk setting was also fun to explore.

Unfortunately it really goes off the rails in the second half as the scope of the story broadens to a murder mystery that gets increasingly bizarre and silly. I felt like I could almost hear the music from Clue as they ran from room to room. But where Clue had fun but still felt like a tight narrative and intriguing mystery, this felt like so many red herrings that you never really had time to form any theories before some new thing was thrown in. By the time we got to the end, I had lost all interest in the mystery and just wanted to be done. I think I honestly could have been satisfied with the way that it ended if it had been trimmed down to something more manageable.

Overall, this had the makings of a fun story but it just tries to do too much without enough time devoted to any of the elements and lost me as a result. If you like over the top mysteries and you want a fun time where you don't really care about the logic or the tension though, you might give this a shot. It's definitely a wild ride.