The Reading Bud

Book Details:

Author: Clark Gillian Van Herrewege
Release Date: 4 May 2026
Series:
Genre: Thriller, Mystery
Format: E-book 
Pages: 210 pages
Publisher: Brave New Books
Blurb:
One billionaire. One Euro. One secret that could kill.
When eccentric billionaire Johan Paepe is found dead in his Brussels mansion, the reading of his will turns into a high-stakes psychological game. Notary Benjamin De Walters is tasked with a bizarre addendum: a billion-euro fortune has been hidden for a decade, and the murderous secret heir is sitting right in his office amongst Johan’s other next of kin.
As Detective Van Der smet deploys cutting-edge AI facial recognition to hunt for a motive among the family members, Ben must rely on his father’s old-world lessons in observation and human nature. In a climate of digital surveillance and political tension, can a notary’s intuition outpace a police algorithm?
A contemporary tribute to the Golden Age of detective fiction, ‘Who Wants To Be A Billionaire’ explores the thin line between the logic of technology and the chaotic mess of family ties.

Review

Who Wants to Be a Billionaire? by Clark Gillian Van Herrewege is a wonderfully unusual mystery novel built around inheritance, suspicion, family resentment, AI-assisted policing, and one very observant Brussels notary named Karel Benjamin De Walters. The premise is instantly intriguing: billionaire author Johan Paepe dies under suspicious circumstances just after changing his will, and his possible heirs are gathered together to discover that one among them may already have secretly inherited his fortune years ago. What follows is part locked-room mystery, part family drama, part satire of wealth, and part philosophical meditation on truth, storytelling, and individual and social actions.

What I enjoyed most is the narrative voice as Benjamin De Walters is not a typical detective figure; he is formal, digressive, cultured, legally precise, and frequently distracted by cinema, memory, grief, and moral reflection. His long meditations on Hitchcock, Belgian law, inheritance structures, and social conduct give the book a distinct personality. At times, these digressions slow the plot, but they also make the novel feel unlike a standard commercial mystery. The book is less interested in rushing toward a revelation and more interested in observing how people reveal themselves under pressure.

The central mystery is deliciously theatrical. The Paepe family members are trapped not only by the possibility of murder, but by money itself: the inheritance becomes a moral test, a psychological trap, and a mirror held up to every old grievance in the room. Pieter, Jochen, Céline, Kenny, Joyabel, Layla, Jean-Baptiste, Nele, and Brenda each bring their own history of need, bitterness, injury, or secrecy, and the AI surveillance system adds a sharp contemporary edge to the proceedings.

That said, this is not a lean mystery. The prose is intentionally expansive, and readers who prefer tight, fast-paced thrillers may find the digressions excessive. The Hitchcock commentary, historical asides, and legal-financial explanations are interesting, but they sometimes compete with the immediacy of the investigation. The novel also moves into increasingly strange and metaphysical territory later on, which may divide readers depending on how much they enjoy genre-blending.

Still, Who Wants to Be a Billionaire? is memorable because it refuses to be ordinary. It is witty, eccentric, dramatic, and unexpectedly tender, especially in the epilogue, where the story closes not with spectacle but with companionship, grief, and the image of Brenda, Benjamin, and Ariadne walking through the purple sea of Hallerbos.

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