The book introduces us to George Porter Dillman, an American about to embark in Liverpool for the Lusitania’s maiden voyage to New York. It emerges that he is a detective employed by Cunard to be a security operative on the voyage and, sure enough, skulduggery and eventually murder require his professional attention, as a couple of attractive women vie for his personal attention.
The plot is pretty run-of-the-mill – although the identity of the killer is well concealed – and the characters are rather laboriously depicted. The shipboard atmosphere is pretty well done, although there is an awful lot of fact-sharing between characters to show how much research the author has done, and the language by no means always reflects the period. The prose is workmanlike but no more, with a sprinkling of rather lazy, stale usages like “gloomy prognostications” and “with consummate ease,” and there is an awful lot of what seemed to me like padding where pretty obvious things are explained at length and a wholly irrelevant and rather annoying side-plot. I skimmed quite a few passages and didn’t feel I’d missed anything. The denouement is quite well constructed, but the dialogue as it plays out is simply absurd and the subsequent struggle is wholly unconvincing.
If it weren’t for the setting I think I may have bailed in this one, and I’m not at all sure I’ll bother with more in the series. Others have plainly enjoyed this a good deal more than I did, but personally I can’t recommend it.
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