Overall Rating: ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

“When a real murder comes, will you be able to spot it in time?”

My brain. My poor lil brain. I am so glad I took my time with this book! I spent every evening for a week enjoying pages and pages of pure mystery goodness and I am once again hungover from such an exceptional read. Authors really are spoiling us this year, aren’t they?! I’m so thrilled to be sharing my review of what has been called the most original literary thriller of the year – Ink Ribbon Red!

About the book

Six friends gather at a country house for a birthday weekend. They decide to play a game.

All six names go in a hat. Choose two, and imagine one murdering the other.

Write it down. Type it up. Read it out.

Points are given for making the murders sound convincing.

Of course, when given such a task, it’s only natural to use what you know.

Secrets. Grudges. Affairs.

But once you’ve put it in a story, that secret is out.

So with each fictional murder, someone gets a motive for a real one.

Which leads to the most important question:

When a real murder comes, will you be able to spot it in time?

The beginning

The opening to this book was genuinely one of the best I’ve read all year. I loved the first few chapters and the character introductions SO much that I actually stopped myself from continuing and started from scratch so I could experience it all over again. Who does that when they have seven million books to get through?! Chapters are short, the order of events is skewed and I was already picking up on some shady characters. It felt clever and unpredictable, and I was hooked straight away! There are six characters we meet early on; Anatol, Janika, Phoebe, Dean, Maya and Marcin. Every year, they spend Anatol’s birthday at his big house in Wiltshire, but this year, things were different – Anatol’s father had tragically passed away just before Anatol’s thirtieth birthday. Was it really an accident? Some of the group were convinced Anatol was behind it. The birthday meet still goes ahead, but I was not, I repeat, was NOT prepared for everything that was about to happen. We’ll get onto all that, just bear with me.

“Marcin didn’t believe in the sanctity of friendship; friendship was often just a sign of shared history, or an indication of a few common interests; it had nothing at all to do with morality.”

As a birthday favour, Anatol requests the group play Motive Method Death, a parlour game which required participants to imagine each other’s deaths, then write them down in the form of a short story or in a couple of scenes. I loved the rules of the game which Anatol had very carefully planned out, but other members of the group weren’t too thrilled about playing due to how long and tedious it was last time they played. But they all reluctantly agree. It was Anatol’s thirtieth (which he kept reminding them whenever he wanted his own way.) We slowly get to know who these characters are and who they could be. We see how they act, what they like, what they dislike. How their minds work, how they would actually kill off their friends. I loved getting to know all these characters in this way. There was a sense of darkness, the start of feelings of dread, like something completely awful was going to happen. And it does, but not in the ways we expect… How much can I explain without giving things away?!

The middle

Now this is where things really start to get interesting. Although a little confusing at first, it all becomes clear and this is something that really excited me. Skip this paragraph if you don’t want a teeny spoiler! The fragmented narrative shows us character’s deaths, like a premonition of what is to come. Some of these deaths were brutal, unexpected. They really made me desperate to see why these characters were murdered. It felt completely thrilling and exiting. But it’s soon revealed that what we read isn’t necessarily the truth. Some of it is fiction within fiction. Some of these chapters are actually parts of what the characters had written for their Motive Method Death stories! I mean, whaaaat?! This is some serious Inception sh*t and I was so impressed by how the hell Pavesi has made it work. It’s so different. I was constantly trying to work out which parts of the book were actually happening, and which parts the characters were making up themselves. Pure genius. I can already see me talking about this book forever. So original, so utterly engrossing.

“What shade is this?”

“I don’t know. Ink ribbon red?”

“Ink ribbon red,” said Marcin. “The colour of fictional blood.”

As we get to know the relationships between these characters and understand their shared histories, we see how so many of these life experiences and different elements find their way into their stories. Secrets. Affairs. Grudges. Lies. Gossip. Their lives are imperfect. Messy. And reading about them was just fascinating. The creativity of these characters (and the author, of course) made my head spin. It was such a brilliant direction. These characters weren’t particularly likeable, but they were the kind of unlikeable characters you can’t help but love. There were so many times I couldn’t work out whether a death was real or not; some characters meet brutal and gory ends, and even though I felt like I knew what the author was doing, he still managed to catch me off guard at every possible turn. I was questioning everything. One thing that really intrigued me was how members of the group receive anonymous notes with cryptic words. I loved finding out more about Gus, Anatol’s father, and I needed to know how he and his death slotted into this whole mystery.

The end

As the ending drew nearer, things started to get weirder. Even the names of some of the chapters were mixed up! Anatol’s character had always felt a bit strange, like there was something off with him, but it seemed to get more pronounced here. What was I missing? What was Anatol up to? My brain felt like it was being pulled in all directions, straining in order to put everything chronologically and work out which parts of what I’d read were the truth. Janika was my favourite character here by far. She knows something is off. She knows some of her friends are hiding something from her. But what?! I felt the best parts of these characters came out to play at this point. To say they were all friends, did any of them really like each other? Was there something deeper at play here? I swear I gave myself a headache thinking about everything and putting things together! It was such an addictive landslide of an ending and it definitely did not disappoint.

“It had been a weekend full of fictional death, but now reality was hammering at the door, screaming through the letterbox. The shrill sound shattered the silence.”

The resolution was so incredibly satisfying in so many ways, like when you’ve just had a really wonderful, filling meal. I guessed one piece of the puzzle, but in the grand scheme of things, it was pretty tiny. I loved the shock of everything we discover here. It was so brilliantly executed and written to perfection. And the FATE of some of these characters, after everything I’d read, had my jaw on the floor. So brilliantly unexpected, the kind of shocking, unpredictable ending you always crave. And to answer the question the author asks us in the synopsis – When a real murder comes, will you be able to spot it in time? – the answer was no, no I did not, even though I tried so hard 😂 I loved the ending chapter and those very final paragraphs, I had to have a bit of a laugh after this book had sucked out all my brain power. I’d really recommend this for fans of an a good mystery (with some gory elements) and for someone who wants to challenge themselves… I will buy you a drink if you can work all this out before the end!! SO clever. Can I start it all over again now?!

Overall Thoughts

Ink Ribbon Red is a mind-bending puzzle of a book, an original, complex and utterly engrossing mystery which follows six friends, a seemingly innocent parlour game and a lot of murder. At times, we aren’t sure what is real or what is fictional as these friends write their own stories, their own scenarios of murder. And I had a blast trying to identify a real murder when it appeared. The characters weren’t the most likeable, but they really were the best type of character for a book like this; easy to visualise, believable motives and so many secrets buried deep. Fragmented chapters were beautifully baffling and really made this book special. A brilliant concept, a book that will stay with you long after finishing that last page. Bravo, Alex!

Huge thanks to the author, Alex Pavesi, and the brilliant team at Michael Joseph for my gifted proof AND finished copy! You can grab your own copy of Ink Ribbon Red right now on Amazon or wherever you buy your books. Make sure you’re following Alex over on Bluesky and X/Twitter!

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