Acclaimed artist and sometime sleuth Benvenuto Brown is heading to New York City aboard the luxury cruise liner Atlanta, his thoughts focused on his upcoming art exhibition. Not on murder, obviously, but on the first night he meets a woman. Intrigued by her strange behaviour, he can’t help but be suspicious when her body is fished out of the water.

Given his reputation as a sleuth – he’s solved a whole two murders! – he is soon enlisted by the ship’s captain to investigate. With s small collection of individuals under suspicion, ranging from young to old, rich to poor, film star to communist, with affairs and death-threats a-plenty, surely five days will be enough to solve the case.

Book Club time again, and it was my pick this time. Elizabeth Gill wrote three mysteries featuring Benvenuto Brown before her untimely death following complications from surgery. A quick note – there is a modern author of the same name who has written non-mystery fiction. The Benvenuto Brown books are, in order, The Crime Coast, What Dread Hand?, and Crime De Luxe. I picked this one as I’d read The Crime Coast and enjoyed it quite a bit, despite it being more thriller than mystery. And, obviously, the curse of Book Club struck again – but not in the way you might expect.

All three titles have been re-released by Dean Street Press, with introductions by Curtis Evans, so I was reading this on my Kindle. And for some reason at one point, when I was about 30% of the way through, it jumped to about 85% where Brown was basically accusing the murderer of doing it. No idea how that happened – I can be a bit clumsy with my fat fingers on devices sometimes, but it would take quite a combination of moves to do this. Anyway, before I realised what had happened – the book does jump from conversation to conversation – there I was about a third of the way through knowing who the murderer was and what their motive was too. Which was a shame, as I was rather enjoying it, but it did give me a chance to look for clues…

Yes, they’re pretty light on the ground – to be honest, it seemed to me like Benvenuto basically guessed the solution. There’s one bit where he has a theory that fits person A and then changes it to person B for no particular reason other than B is the actual killer. And, also, the identity of the killer does satisfy Classic Crime Cliché Number 4…

That’s not to say it’s not worth reading. The suspects tend to be quite opinionated about this, that and the other – one “highlight” is a female character explaining the difference between men and women. Not the strongest feminist statement in the world… The communist character is quite fun too – not entirely sure how seriously these statements are supposed to be – I hope “not very”…

The majority of the book consists of Benvenuto falling for one of the suspects, while, in the background of the investigation, most of the characters seem to be trying to get off with one of the others (although not their spouses). It’s certainly a lot more blatant than any shenanigans that you’d get from Dame Agatha. It does add an extra something that lifts this beyond the average question-and-answer style interrogations from the Golden Age.

All in all, it’s a fun read, if not a first-class mystery. At some point I’ll get round to reading the second in the series.