Title
The very title of the book is ironic. A Halloween party connotes fake scares and terror in the name of a good time and having fun. The children’s Halloween party with which the book begins commences a series of actual terrors involving multiple criminal acts, including several murders.
Joyce
The book opens with a thirteen-year-old girl named Joyce boasting that she had once witnessed a murder. Shortly afterward, she is found drowned in a tub of water used to play bobbing for apples. Her murder is thus doubly ironic. She is herself murdered after her boast which nobody actually believed was true. And she is a young partygoer who is killed using a Halloween party game necessity.
Motive
Four murders are committed with a financial motive. The motive is to maintain a robust inheritance from being collected by an outsider rather than by family members. The irony is that the outsider to whom the inheritance would go is a poor foreign girl named Olga with no access to the kind of legal help that would have been needed to fight the claims of the family members. In other words, an expensive lawyer hired by the family members could more easily—and successfully—had kept their inheritance fully intact.
The Forger
The first attempt at keeping the outsider from her own rightful inheritance was an obviously forged version of the actual codicil designed to attack the credibility of Olga. Once that attempt fails, the forgery accomplice becomes a case of someone who knows too much. And so, ironically, the person brought in to keep the outsider from having to be murdered is himself murdered.
A Lie to Die For
Everyone immediately thinks that Joyce is making up her story about having witnessed a murder because she has a reputation for being a compulsive liar. The detective investigating the case immediately assumes that despite Joyce’s reputation, her murder may be connected to her story. This turns out to be true, but in a cruelly ironic way. Joyce’s story of having witnessed a murder was only partially a lie. A murder had been committed and there had been a witness, but that witness wasn’t Joyce. Another girl named Miranda had actually seen the murder taking place. She told Joyce and Joyce made the story her own by claiming to have been the witness.
