A long time ago I learned that authors get paid to write reviews of other authors’ works, which I thought was disappointing because I liked to believe that authors are giving an honest opinion when they write their reviews and are not influenced by monetary gain. But after seeing the praise for The Hitchcock Hotel from the likes of Riley Sager, Alex Michaelides and A. J. Finn, I am convinced that authors are pocketing money as they trick us into reading crappy books, because The Hitchcock Hotel is not a good novel.

The Hitchcock Hotel is about an Alfred Hitchcock aficionado named Alfred Smettle who is the owner and operator of a Hitchcock themed hotel. On the one-year anniversary of his hotel’s opening, Alfred decides to invite is five friends from college for a reunion weekend at his hotel. The friends reluctantly accept his invitation because none of them have spoken to Alfred since he was expelled from college fifteen or so years earlier. But Alfred’s invitation is not meant to make up for past grievances; instead, Alfred is planning a murder. Who ends up being murdered, though, may be a surprise to Alfred, but not to the reader.

There are a lot of things I do not like about The Hitchcock Hotel, but the biggest thing is the character of Alfred. He is a protagonist who is actually the bad guy of the story, but he is not even one of those charming bad guys that you cannot help but root for. Any white guy who idolizes a sadist like Alfred Hitchcock is a red flag, but Alfred Smettle is just a plain ole creep. The story is partially told from his first-person perspective, and I found it unpleasant to be in his head. I also found it unbelievable that the other characters in the novel were friends with him in college. It feels like Wrobel is trying to force some sympathy for Alfred when it is revealed why he was expelled from college, but nah, dude fucked around and found out. There is nothing special about him as a villain and he is just as insipid as all the other characters in the story. There is nobody to root for in this novel. I would not have cared if they all died.

As for the murderer, who they are is not some ingenious revelation as one would expect by the amount of smoke being blown up the reader’s ass by reviewers. It really is not surprising at all. The annoying thing is that after the murderer is revealed, the reader must slog through, like, three chapters of exposition of how the murderer pulled things off, like in a movie when the villain takes the time to give a detailed explanation of their plans. A good writer would leave breadcrumbs of hints throughout the story so the reader can piece it all together themselves instead of having to be told exactly how it happened.

Do not buy into the hype with this one. I am mad at myself for spending my hard-earned money on this book.