Death strikes in a locked compartment on a train!

Five Found Dead: A Novel by Sulari Gentill          

⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

Not just any train but the Orient Express!

Sulari Gentill has done it again. Produced a mystery novel that travels known ground and casts a different shadow.

Twins, Joe and Meredith Penvale, are brother and sister, a pair of Australians who are taking a trip on the Orient Express as a celebration. Joe is a mystery writer who’s been battling cancer. He’s on the mend. Meredith his sister has supported him through his long and arduous treatment.

Two important things happen. 

A man appears to have been murdered in the compartment next door to theirs. There’s a great deal of blood, yet his body has disappeared from the locked compartment.  There are no windows big enough to climb in or out of.

Passengers have contacted a new virulent strain of Covid, called the Paris strain. Two carriages have been set aside and locked down, containing the infected passengers and people they’ve come in contact with.

The Italian authorities have refused the train permission to go into Venice and insist on its return to Paris.

The body count rises. There’s an over abundance of policeman and detectives on the train and they form a group to investigate. They're twelve in number, like a jury! (Yes, my friends, I see you say Aha!)

The setting is wonderful! The Orient Express, with the ghosts of Agatha Christie and Hercule Pirot, Patricia Highsmith, Alfred Hitchcock, all silent ghosts—witnesses in the background of the tale.

A fabulously clever take on the ‘death on a train’ and the ‘locked room trope’ presented with a particularly Sulari Gentill flavor.

(I note that Gentill has been fighting cancer during the production of this novel. Hats off to her for producing this masterpiece during her travails)

A Poisoned Pen ARC via NetGalley.                                              

Many thanks to the author and publisher.