24th November 2024

I had been looking out for this first Tom Hindle novel for a while before coming across two copies together in a charity shop. I was imagining it to be the first in the series, but having read it, it seems I was wrong and these are standalone novels.

In this story, we meet an officer on a cross-Atlantic liner who is both unwilling and unwanted as assistant to a Scotland Yard detective who shows up just after a suspicious death aboard. It’s also 1924.

The narrative took me a few chapters to get into, and for a while I was thinking that I might have made a mistake in choosing this. But I was soon hooked and desperate to continue racing through. There is an element of old fashionedness to the narration, feeling like it’s intended to put one in mind of the 1920s, and I wasn’t sure this wasn’t more alienating than scene-setting. In a few places I found myself having to turn back and page and re-read because my eyes had skipped into skimming mode.

At the end though, I was very satisfied with what I’d experienced and found myself thinking about looking out for the next book.

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