The novel is fast and intelligent, as I expected from one of my favorite series. Daisy, a young journalist in the post-WWI England, gets on the Flying Scotsman, an express train to Edinburgh, and of course, there is a murder on the train, in a compartment next to hers. The situation is further complicated by:
a) The victim was a rich old man, and all his relatives are traveling on the same train, trying to make him change his will in their favor. Did any of them kill him?
b) Daisy’s special friend, Detective Chief Inspector of Scotland Yard Alec Fletcher, has a ten-year-old daughter, Belinda. Having run away from her strict grandmother, Belinda stows away on the same train. Daisy has no choice but to take the girl under her wing. She doesn’t mind, she rather likes the girl, but of course, the grandmother, who already dislikes Daisy, would blame her for Belinda’s escapade.
The narration flows effortlessly from start to end, as the series protagonists, Alec and Daisy, investigate the murder. She is her usual charming self, kind and perceptive, and as usual, everybody confides in her, while his portrait is deeper than in most other books of the series, due to his daughter’s presence.
The novel is enriched by a set of colorful and diverse secondary characters, including the recurring personages of Alec’s colleagues, Tom Tring and Piper, as well as a host of suspects – the members of the victim’s extended family. There are so many of them that in the beginning I felt confused. But the writer helped me out by providing a graph of the family tree, the first such chart I have ever seen in a mystery novel.
Structurally, the tale is a typical ‘murder-on-a-train’ mystery, where almost every passenger in the car has had a motive and an opportunity for the crime. It’s up to Daisy and Alec to unravel the complicated pattern of people’s moves and incentives that had led to the murder.
This novel is not the best of the Daisy Dalrymple series, but it’s a solid mystery story nonetheless, and I read it with pleasure.
For the fans of the series – definitely a must.
