Murder on the Oceanic (Ocean Liner Mysteries, 7)
The seventh in the Ocean Liner series sees our on-board detectives, the married duo George Porter Dillman and Genevieve Masefield, embark on the Oceanic at Southampton for a journey to New York in 1910. Calling at Cherbourg and Queenstown in Ireland (now Cobh), the White Star line vessel is an impressively large and ornately fitted out (in first class, anyway) ship. There is one very important passenger on the voyage, the immensely wealthy financier and banker J. P. Morgan, who joins the vessel in France. There is the customary range of minor thefts and issues to cope with, until the murder takes place. The crime is committed within Morgan’s entourage, which makes it, and the subsequent investigation by the detectives, markedly sensitive and difficult. Both Dillman and Masefield are also the recipient of unwanted romantic and sexual advances from passengers, which provide a distraction from their investigations into the various crimes in the first-class area of the vessel.
The story is expertly plotted and structured. Some of the characters behave in ways which seem a little unlikely in the first decade of the 20th century; the dynamics of personal relations seem just a little off-true. Not always, but at times it does not seem quite right. And on this occasion, I was able to identify the criminals before the denouément. Nonetheless an enjoyable and undemanding read in the company of the two likeable characters Genevieve and George.
