I’ve never been a reviewer or critic who loved throwing darts at writers. (Although James Patterson and Phillip Margolin … you are loads of fun to dis!) Generally, I just don’t spend a lot of time on books that don’t in some way resonate with me. T.M. Logan’s The Room in the Attic falls in that gray area, because there is much to relish here, but I felt the end was more of a snack than a full meal.
Adam, Jess, their three young kids, Leah, Daisy and Callum, along with golden retriever Coco and a cat named Steve, have just moved into their fancy new home in an exclusive suburb of Nottingham, England. Unpacking, exploring – it’s a large house, one that the couple had never imagined they’d be living in, and right off, Adam discovers a secret room hidden behind a wardrobe in a bedroom.
(Secret(s): would crime fiction even be a thing without them? Spies? No way. Youthful indiscretions one desperately wants kept buried, an extremely (over) used plot device? Nope.)
In that room, Adam, who narrates the story, finds several seemingly random items, including a Rolex, an old flip-phone, a dog tag on a collar. It’s actually an auspicious moment for Adam, finding that Rolex; he’s been made redundant at his vaguely defined software job, but hasn’t quite managed to give Jess the bad news.
He shows the family the items but withholds the watch. It’s off to a pawn shop to see what that sucker will bring. The £4000 he gets is manna from heaven.
Logan keeps the story moving at a frisky pace, with short punchy chapters, sometimes interrupted for a different first-person voice who we soon realize is someone connected to something, but it’s all vague initially.
A cascade of problems begins as the family try to settle in. Steve the cat gets stuck in a tree and while Adam is rescuing him, he finds a camera secreted inside a “bird box.” Mildly freaked out, the couple begin researching the background of the house and also determine that the old cell phone still works. So, they call a number that appears on its screen. A text reply startles them, asking for a list of the items and their immediate return. Who’s asking, and what to do? Throughout the story, Logan cagily layers in the red herrings that often close the chapters.
The nuanced description of the secret room is unnerving: “Totally, fully black, like being at the bottom of the ocean. Nothing leaks through, not even the slightest gray hint of anything outside. To compliment the darkness, the hidden room is also silent in a way that is so rare I’d almost forgotten what it’s like. A stillness that is complete and undisturbed, all sounds from outside deadened by the bricks surrounding me, the thick rugs fixed to the walls and floor … This small space is like a separate, silent world that exists in parallel to the daylight world outside … The darkness is so thick I can almost feel it pressing against my skin, so complete that I can’t even see the fingers in front of my face when they are only inches away.”
More peculiar, unexplainable events occur; the family feels as though they have made a mistake – the house just doesn’t feel like home. They track down the owner of the dog collar. They go back and forth with the disembodied texter on the flip phone. We meet Dom, Jess’s cool brother, who provides welcome support.
A noisy neighbor tells them about the previous owner, and that person’s grandson, Shaun, shows up, passive-aggressively looking for some “family things.” More cameras are discovered. The local police are bored as they listen to Adam and Jess’s worries. Things are tense! Shaun turns out to be an unemployed actor hired to retrieve the objects, and swears he was set up.
As the plot amps up, the misdirection employed by Logan compounds. Adam, in a boneheaded decision, lets a man named Webber, who claims to be a cop, into the house, but they end up having a pint and Webber, with a somewhat convoluted explanation pulls out the Rolex and tells Adam about its meaning in a cold case – a bit hard to swallow. But by now, 2/3rds of the way through, Logan has us savoring the often-faux twists and cliff-hanger chapter endings to the extent we don’t mind this out-of-the-blue new character entering the story. He and Adam team up.
But. For this reader, the story begins to feel off – in a key sequence, Jess suddenly behaves and talks unlike the person she had been throughout the story. The climactic battle, if you will, in the hidden room is exciting. What’s not exciting is the wrap up – our “villain” comes in from left field, having been a bit player until a startling appearance. And Webber, so prevalent for about 50 pages, is out of the picture by the end, reduced to being stuck in traffic!
The Room in the Attic certainly has many positive attributes. The unwinding of the significance of the random detritus and the backstories of the people whose items Adam found makes for a compelling mystery. But when an ending falls flat, it’s disappointing after such a solid lead-up. That said, I would not hesitate to read more from T.M. Logan.
Peter Handel has been writing about crime fiction since the early 1990s. His reviews, interviews, and profiles have appeared in the San Francisco Chronicle, the Portland Oregonian, Pages Magazine, Mystery Reader’s Journal, The Rap Sheet and CrimeReads. Join his Substack here.
