Seven worried people have gathered for dinner in Notting Hill, London, but it’s the first time six of them have seen one another since 1999, when they spent a heady, intense summer building a website that was meant to revolutionize online dating by making matches based on psychological testing. They presence in Notting Hill to celenrate the life of their recently deceased ex-employer, a professor that brought them together in 1999. For them it was an unsettling experience, as they lived and worked on a remote countryside estate. Their boss was obsessive and opaque. Following a raucous night in which they all pissed too much and made some cataclysmic choices, the project was abruptly shut down before it was launched, with no obvious explanation.

Now their dinner hosts are behaving oddly, the extra guest’s back story doesn’t add up, and everyone is trapped without cellphone service or Wi-Fi at a fancy townhouse where the high-security system has somehow locked them all inside. The aim is to force them to reveal the secrets they concealed from one another all those years ago. The penalty for failing to participate, or for revealing the wrong secret appears to be death.

What is meant to be a night of bittersweet nostalgia soon becomes a twisted and deadly game. The old friends are given an ultimatum to reveal their darkest secrets to the group or pick each other off one-by-one. It soon becomes clear that their current predicament is related to their shared past. The love questionnaire they helped develop in 1999 for the dating site was also tuned into a tool for weeding out psychopaths: The Wasp Trap. This  experiment and the other tragic events of that summer long ago may help reveal the truth behind a killer hiding in plain sight.

Alternating between past and present with a colourful ensemble of characters, The Wasp Trap. Edward’s psychological tale starts slowly but accelerates with head-spinning velocity as the secrets come spilling out. Blackmail, sexual betrayal, unexpected deaths and maybe murder- it’s amazing what a group of supposed tech nerds go up to in the previous millennium.

There’s a connection to the off-piste psychometric-test that one of the group, Lily, devised back then as a way to ferret out psychopaths in the dating pool- the “wasp trap”. “ It’ll be fine, I’ll base it on the same algorithm we’re using for this site” Lily said 

The Wasp Trap: A Novel by Mark Edwards (Atria £$29) 400 pages