Review: Murder on the Airship

Murder on the Airship by Victoria Bergman
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I've been reading a lot of classic mystery books lately, largely because a lot of the new fantasy books coming out now are not to my taste. So I was pleased to find that this book combined the two: a mystery with a limited pool of suspects (but there are seven of them, so it takes some work), set in a fantasy world. I also enjoyed the fact that the detective wasn't a brilliant savant but an ordinary guard, thrust into the position of having to solve the crime because her boss has been (non-fatally) poisoned in the course of events, who takes a doggedly persistent approach to interviewing the suspects and figuring out the course of events. It's much more Freeman Wills Crofts than Austin W. Freeman, in other words, and if you're also a fan of hundred-year-old mystery books you'll probably know what that means. Also, there's no romance, indeed no romantic or sexual relationships, whatsoever, and while I don't object to those, it is refreshing to have a book that just focuses on the mystery.

The course of events is complicated, meaning that it's far from clear for a long time who has committed what crime, and specifically who has committed the murder. It's well orchestrated and cleverly done, though, like the protagonist, I wondered how all these people hadn't stumbled across each other while nefariously wandering the ship late at night.

It's usually a pretty sound rule of thumb that if there's an airship in a book, there are also multiple vocabulary errors. I don't know why this is. Fortunately, in this book I only spotted one such error, a common one which I will mention to the publisher and which may well be gone by publication. (I had a pre-publication version via Netgalley for review.)

The editing is generally OK, though there are a few common issues - occasional missing past perfect tense, "may" in past tense narration where it should be "might" - and a slight oddity in the punctuation of some dialog. Again, I'll mention these to the publisher, and some of them may well be fixed by publication.

This is a sound piece of mystery writing, and an appealing fantasy world, two things I enjoy separately which it turns out I also enjoy together. I'll be looking out for more from this author.

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