I quite enjoyed The Couple At The Table, but I found the first half slow going, with lots of names and complex positionings of people and places to remember. It picked up half way through and made a decent Golden-Age-style mystery, but I found it a bit unsatisfactory overall.
The book is in many ways a modern take on a classic Country House Mystery, with a seemingly impossible puzzle at its core. Several couples, including Waterhouse an Zailer are on holiday at an exclusive resort when one of them is murdered. The evidence shows that the one person who was with the victim couldn’t have killed her, the others were together the whole time elsewhere and it’s not possible that anyone else could have got in. It’s an ingenious set-up, although I began to suspect at least part of the solution fairly early on. As more information gradually comes to light later and DC Waterhouse doggedly and obsessively pursues the enquiry, complex backstories begin to emerge and eventually there is a Poirot-esque “One of you in this room is the murderer” denouement.
I’ve only read a few of Sophie Hannah’s stand-alones before this and I’m new to this series. It probably doesn’t help that I don’t know any of the characters and their pasts, but I did find this hard going to begin with. Also, in Hannah’s others I’ve read, she has some witty and trenchant things to say about character and places; this is almost exclusively a puzzle plot with a little quirkiness and background thrown in from Waterhouse and Zailer, which interests me rather less.
I think fans of ingenious mysteries will enjoy this far more than I did. Personally, I wasn’t really engaged. Sophie Hannah is a very good writer and storyteller, so it wasn’t bad by any means, but I did find it just a tad unsatisfying.
(My thanks to Hodder & Stoughton for an ARC via NetGalley.)
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