Murder on the Apricot Coast (Marion Halligan, A&U, $21.95 tpb, ISBN 9781741753844, March) ***

Murder on the Apricot Coast is the sequel to Halligan’s The Apricot Colonel, and shows us Cassandra and the Colonel at the beginning of their married life. A mystery is introduced when a friend’s daughter is found dead. The story is a stand-alone one, and can be understood perfectly without having read the earlier book, but something of the characterisation may be lost. The most striking personality quirk of Cassandra’s husband, for example—his glamorous cross-dressing—receives only minimal page space in this sequel. In general this book felt like a wonderful idea that couldn’t quite deliver what it promised. The mystery, which took a shockingly sordid turn early on, petered out and lost momentum. Book editor Cassandra and her apricot-preserving Colonel, a promisingly eccentric couple, remained rather distant and undeveloped. The literary references and intellectual discussions at book launches, while rather charming, slowed the pace to the point that the book quite often seemed to forget that it was a mystery at all. It is, however, an easy and fairly pleasant read; and there is a certain charm in seeing editing skills employed to solve a mystery. It will probably appeal to those who like their crime fiction literary and light-hearted.

Jarrah Moore works for the Global Books in Print database at Thorpe-Bowker.

This review from Australian Bookseller & Publisher magazine is reproduced by kind permission of Thorpe-Bowker, a division of R R Bowker LLC. © Copyright 2008, Thorpe-Bowker

Tags: marion halligan