Who Wants to Be a Billionaire? follows Brussels notary Benjamin de Walters as he presides over the strangest inheritance case of his career: the estate of Johan Paepe, a reclusive billionaire author whose will first leaves his family one euro, then twists into a billion-euro moral trap. Six heirs, one secret beneficiary, an AI-assisted police investigation, and a possible murder turn what should be a formal reading into a pressure cooker of grief, greed, accusation, and revelation. What begins in the controlled civility of a notary’s office keeps widening, from Johan’s decaying mansion to Usufruct, to the machinery of the Paepe empire, to an almost cosmic final passage over the Bermuda Triangle. It’s part mystery, part family reckoning, part philosophical fever dream.

I found the book most alive when it let people talk themselves into ruin. The early scenes around the table have a prickly, theatrical charge, with everyone trying to sound reasonable while their desperation leaks through the seams. Céline’s grief over Jens, Kenny’s wounded confusion about Joyabel, Pieter’s abrasive refusal to play along, and Nele’s quiet devotion to Brenda all give the inheritance plot a bruised emotional texture. The AI investigation is a smart provocation, too, because it’s not just a gadget. It becomes a mirror that flattens suffering into scores, reducing bankruptcy, illness, addiction, and bereavement into motive. I felt the book was asking a sharp question: when technology claims to see the truth, what parts of the human soul does it trample on to get there?

The writing is eccentric in a way I mostly admired. Benjamin’s voice wanders, digresses, lectures, remembers, and circles back, sometimes like a man telling a story over too much coffee, sometimes like a notary trying to notarize chaos itself. His long riffs on Hitchcock, especially Rear Window, The Birds, and Saboteur, could easily have felt ornamental, but for me they gave the book its strange weather. They echo the themes of watching, staging, suspicion, and performance. Not every detour lands with the same force. Still, I liked the unruly ambition of it. The book isn’t content to be a clean little puzzle box. It wants inheritance law, family trauma, cinema, capitalism, AI, religion, and metaphysics all seated at the same disastrous dinner table.

By the end, I was less interested in who “won” the fortune than in what the fortune had revealed about everyone who came near it. The epilogue in the purple sea of Hallerbos resonated with me because it lets the noise drain away and leaves only survival, tenderness, and the mercy of being understood. This is a strange and heartfelt novel. I’d recommend it to readers who like locked-room mysteries with philosophical tangents, family dramas with teeth, and books that aren’t afraid to veer from legal realism into something far more uncanny.

Pages: 210 | ASIN ‏ : ‎ B0GYMF6JMW