Today’s mystery is set a little closer to home in Northumberland, although the characters rapidly become snow-bound at a country abode, so the similarities did stop there, as when I was reading the book it was pretty hot weather (the thermostat showed 22.5 degrees!).
Synopsis
‘Torben Helle – art historian, Danish expat and owner of several excellent Scandinavian jumpers – has been dragged to a remote snowbound Northumbrian mansion for a ten-year reunion with old university friends. Things start to go sideways when their host, a reclusive and irritating tech entrepreneur, makes some shocking revelations at the dinner table. And when these are followed by an apparent suicide, the group faces a test of their wits… and their trust.
Snowed in and cut off, surrounded by enigmatic housekeepers and off-duty police inspectors, not to mention a peculiar last will and testament, suspicion and sarcasm quickly turn to panic. As the temperature drops and the tension mounts, Torben decides to draw upon all the tricks of Golden Age detectives past in order to solve the mystery: how much money would it take to turn one of his old friends into a murderer? But he’d better be quick, or someone else might end up dead…’
Overall Thoughts
The opening chapter begins with the description of a man who has committed suicide and the protagonist, Torben Helle, is analysing the scene. But it is not real. The scene is a painting in a book that Helle is reviewing. I felt this was a cleverly constructed description of a death scene, as it starts off sounding like it is really happening, but then it melts into literary critique, and you realise your mistake.
I love the blunder Torben makes at Newcastle train station, when he is trying to board his connecting train. The phrase “it’s priceless” came to mind as he ends up bundling an older woman and her shopping bags back on to a train she had just exited. His ‘unsolicited chivalry’ backfires spectacularly and Torben is not without self-awareness: ‘Torben took stock. Had he literally just picked up an old woman? It appeared that he had. Apparently emergencies turned him into some sort of … molestatory stevedore?’
It was interesting seeing the North through Torben’s eyes, as he finds menace in the landscape. He feels that the River Tyne is ‘lying in wait’ for him, which sounds predatory. There is also this sense of going back to a more savage time and place: ‘[…] ferns sagged over the brick banks, lurid in colour, somehow Jurassic […] an uninviting landscape, for all its brutal grandeur.’ Although I am not sure why anyone would expect something they find ‘brutal’ to be inviting…
The reader is introduced to the weekend party guests in chunks and we hear about the host, Anthony, second hand, before meeting him in person. Given the type of mystery we are reading, it is only natural to wonder what the host’s intentions are. All invited guests had been told to leave phones at home and any who did not comply had to hand them in. There are the usual hints of secrets and past traumas from their time at university and one knows these will come back to haunt them. This is becoming something of a common trope these days, with The 12 Days of Murder (2023) by Andreina Cordani, being another university reunion mystery which sprang to mind. I do wonder though if the market is at risk of becoming bloated with the trope. I don’t feel these are characters I would want to hang out with in real life, but I found them less repellent than the characters in Cordani’s novel. It is a pity that the backstory to Ruth is rather stereotyped, as it leads to her thoughts becoming fairly cliched. Consequently, it is easy to map her trajectory in the plot from the word go.
Conveniently for the plot, Torben gets particularly drunk the first night so he is unreliable when it comes to providing memories relevant to the runup of the death of Anthony. To begin with it looks like a straightforward case of suicide, with the scene mirroring elements of the opening vignette, but then Torben begins to have doubts. Torben is joined by Ruth and Leyla (police officer and lawyer respectively), and they decide to not fully share what they have uncovered with the rest of the group, who they regard more as suspects. This generates a nice dose of tension as the remaining party guests unsurprisingly take offence. Torben is apt when he thinks it is all becoming ‘toxic’. The lack of phones and the snow (which even Torben has to accept is unnavigable – he had been snooty about snow in England at the start of the book) means they’re on their own when it comes to resolving the situation.
The initial investigation is okay, with the trio theorising how likely each suspect is to be guilty. Although as this went on, it becomes dull, and you don’t feel like they are getting much further forward. Between pages 150-200 things slow down and by two-thirds of the way into the story, the narrative almost feels like it will grind to a halt.
During the middle of investigation the trio decide to adopt a different sleuthing approach, focusing on conversation instead:
“Nuance, diplomacy, intuition – these are the things you can actually rely on.”
“So what do you propose? Fact-free detection?” said Ruth
“Well, I suppose it’s hardly an unprecedented concept,” said Leyla.
“Messy stuff, that’s what we need,” said Torben. “Casual conversation, stuff that takes time to digest… If anybody, in theory, could have done it, then we need to be more sensitive to minutiae. Whose actions – the small ones, not their headline movements – have been inconsistent?”
So basically, they are just going to do what Miss Marple and Poirot would have started doing ages ago.
In the final quarter, the characters begin to fear there is an outsider hiding in the house, so the story veers off into thriller territory. The panic which occurs when a weapon goes missing does not prevent them from acting stupidly, such as going off alone or getting drunk. The solution was what I thought it would be and I did figure it out pretty quickly, whilst the characters are still examining Anthony and his room. The real solution is too obviously signposted, and later on the narrative leans too hard into its classic crime allusions. The red herring solution was never that convincing. I found the middle of the book to be quite meandering and unfortunately it was a book I tired of before I reached the end. In this story the characters have to take some large deductive leaps and I think finishing this novel, left me considering what the modern mystery novel in general needs to work on. To that end, questions which I think should be asked more often are: How do my characters arrive at the truth? How do I get my characters to make consistent progress to reach this target point?
Rating: 3.5/5
See also: The Puzzle Doctor reviewed this title here.