It’s not always the fatally hot passionate mysteries on sun soaked beaches or picturesque rivieras, that make for dramatic tales of murder. Sometimes it’s the slowly thawing tensions, being surrounded with ones by the silent isolation of ice, snow and storms that sets the scene for a mind racing and heart stopping mystery. This is what travel writer Chlóe Campbell discovers onboard the highly anticipated airship through the arctic.
The travel writer, feeling down after a series of rejection, in writing and love, is offered her dream travel writing assignment. A top travel magazine editor had to pull out last minute, asking Campbell to step in, alongside his photographer Ben. Skyline Voyages is launching a new airship with a group of crew, socialites, old friends of the CEO, founder and our travel magazine duo along for its first voyage into the Arctic.
When a member of travel party is murdered in their room, Chlóe soon starts to doubt whether it really was an accident or someone wanted to stop the airship from launching to the public, but why? With a weekend to solve it, Chlóe must sacrifice her story if she wants to solve the case, despite her reluctant, the killer must be caught before they strike again.
What strikes me the most about Tom Hindle’s approach to murder mysteries, is how we don’t see events from just one perspective. We see chapters focusing on different characters viewpoints and reactions. It alternates, yet we still get to spend a significant take of time with Chlóe Campbell, who finds herself the uninviting yet intrigued detective of the Arctic. She is taken out of her comfort zone, in a torn up falling time of her life. Campbell ends up solving a mystery she never expected to be capable of solving to its very end.
“As she watched the snowflakes hurling themselves at her window, she couldn’t help but think that this place itself didn’t want them there.”
As Chlóe Campbell in Death in the Arctic by Tom Hindle
I absolutely adore when the journalist/writer becomes the detective (as a fan of Lois and Clark from the 90s television show). We see this in Chloe, a struggling but budding travel writer who’s offered the scoop of a lifetime as one of the first to go on Skyline Voyages, a luxury airship. The writer gets caught up in her own story. This murder mystery is not overly dramatic or sensationalised, but it feels eerily possible as a mystery. It’s thanks to well rounded, complex tragic or morally grey characters who jump off the page.
Hindle’s books are a thrilling intelligent masterminded game of who done its, where it’s never predictable. This is thanks to small clues and details woven into each chapter, distinct to a situations or characters. The cold hearted Arctic murder is solved over the course of a weekend, as Characters are stuck onboard, during a storm. It raises the heart pounding stakes and tension as Chlóe and her photographer Ben are surrounded by the suspects and the killer. They have a limited timeline to figure out if something sinister took place, before they repeat the plane and its snowy village town port.
This book has become my favourite murder mystery by Tom Hindleso far. I absolutely adore a good locked room or on location murder mystery. In tales where out amateur detectives, victims and suspects met.m each other for the first time and are whisked away to a off grid location, where the murder took place in close proximity, so it had to be one of them who did it.
Death in the Arctic is an expect crafted mystery of unpredictable dangerously thrilling twists, clever clues sprinkled in each character, their stories and relationships, and curiously rounded yet morally emotionally characters. The motive fits the murder as the suspects cast doubt on each other. Amateur detective Chloe’s final reveal between herself and the murdered, wraps up the mystery, but not without curve throwbacks throw in as soon as the reader thinks they’ve cracked the case. The build up plays off in a climatic confrontation that seems eerily to real when it comes to human nature. It also has an added epilogue that shows the underrated take when the second aftermath of a mystery, once the murders are solved.
If you’re in the mood for a winter tale of murder, chills and sky travels, Death in the Arctic is the ideal choice to get back into this genre, and giving your brain a new puzzle to solve.
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