Last Voyage is a quintessential British mystery novel by Anna Clarke and is not too bad. It is kind slow, but that’s a common characteristic with this type of novel.
Sally Livingstone was once aboard a ship from Cape Town to London as a child and had a rather startling experience in which she came across a man shoving a woman’s body through a porthole. Ten years later, Sally’s sister introduces the family fiancée, who has a very familiar face. Sally has developed a friendship with a doctor who she meets as an adult on a subsequent boat trip. As she starts to recall more about that long-ago trip, she is finding her memories to be a little unreliable and she may have identified the wrong man as a killer.
This was kind of a slow and somewhat unremarkable read, but it was still pretty good. I thought the plot was interesting enough to keep me engaged. It is a book that feels a little longer than it actually is.
Clarke is a pretty good writer, and I have a few more of her works I plan to get through eventually.
This is one of many shipboard murder mysteries floating around the literary landscape, and although it doesn’t really stand out as anything terribly unique or spectacular, it serves adequately as a pleasant diversion.
Next up, I return to something to something with a bit more grit with Lawrence Block’s Hit Man,
Reviews, Musings, and Other Things... 