Murder Under a Green Sea by Philip Hunter: book review

I love a good historical murder mystery and I’m generally quite forgiving of the odd eccentricity. That said, I have to confess to mixed feelings about Philip Hunter’s Murder Under a Green Sea. It ought to be right up my street. Set in 1937, with war on the horizon, it focuses in on Max and his wife Martha. Martha is very rich and Max, who has a very humble background, is poor. When members of Max’s old platoon from the first World War start dying in suspicious circumstances and Max is the prime suspect, the two of them set out to try and solve the mystery.

What was so problematic? There were  couple of things. The first was that it was very slow to start. For much of the opening I ploughed on through bits of story that seemed at best unnecessary and at worst silly. There was a dinner party scene that seemed to go on as long as the dinner party itself and, although it later emerged that some of what went on there was germane to the later plot development, it could have been done a lot more quickly and a lot more snappily. And, bluntly, the same thing could have been achieved with better (for which read more subtle) development of the characters.

Fortunately I have staying power. I hung in there and when the plot finally took off it was (apart from the odd little niggle) pretty good — very Boy’s Own in places, to the point of stretching my credibility, but nevertheless it was fast-moving and exciting. (Though I’m sorry — I identified the villain very early on, though not the motive.)

I liked the set-up very much, with Max’s insecurity balanced against his wife’s self-confidence and, beneath it all, a tender love story between the two. The rest of the characters weren’t so good, though — I think that’s why the action felt, in places, little bit beyond my credibility.

The big problem I had with it was tone. As so often the case it’s a subjective thing, but I didn’t feel the flippancy of the overall style was in keeping with the plot and, as a consequence, it undermined my enjoyment of the whole story. It’s a great plot and I wanted to get on with it. The author’s constant flippant asides irritated me intensely when, if he’d kept his humour to the characters (their speech and their actions) he might have got away with it.

It’s a good book if you like your thrillers flippant, which I don’t, but it’s the plot that saves it — though I’d very much like to have got into the plot a lot earlier.

Thanks to Netgalley and Mirror Books for a copy of this book in return for an honest review.