The Empress Murders

Described as razor-sharp and mind-bendingly clever, there are bits of that I could probably agree with, but there were too many other "bits" which made this a particularly rare DNF for me. From the blurb to save a bit of time here:

It's 1925 and the Empress of Australia is making her regular Atlantic crossing, New York–bound, with a full manifest of passengers.

When a dead body is uncovered onboard, it is up to Inspector Archie Daniels to find the killer. But solving one murder quickly turns into solving two, then three, and it becomes clear that Daniels must act fast to avoid an all-souls-lost–level calamity. No one, from the horrendously wealthy and entitled first-class passengers to those they consider the dregs of empire below deck, is safe. And no one can get off ...

The second locked room mystery in a row for me, which starting out did seem like it was going to be razor-sharp and mind-bendingly clever, what with a ship doing the narration, a busy (granted too busy) cast packed to the brim with horrible people, saying just the sort of disgusting things you'd expect from horrible people (the author does provide a language warning at the start - it's authentic undoubtedly but it's still bloody horrible), and you're instantly dragged back to the time of fading Empire. On a cruise ship in which there are a hell of a lot of people, a lot of whom start dying. Even the "narrator" admits at one point that you don't have to keep track of them so I took the ship's advice to heart - then found it was easy as I really didn't care for a single one of them.

And I absolutely get that this author is doing something different, and therefore very confrontational here, and there's a sense of humour and some expectation exploding going on. But, I don't know, it all felt a bit ... staged? Over the top on purpose. Maybe gleeful. I'm not sure, either way, somewhere just past half way through the book, we end up in a sodding bloodbath, and it all started to get very bizarre and I'd been skipping the worst of the bits that were making MY stomach churn and I found myself fondly recalling there were some shelves that needed dusting, and really I should probably do those dishes piling up, and let's face it - when housework starts to sound appealing, I'm in the wrong book.

So I gave up. Better readers than me, and all that, but with the following warnings:

• Even pre-warned, the racist / sexist language is confronting (more so because of the almost gleeful manner in which some of it is delivered)
• Domestic violence references
• Violence, mutilation and gore (which description doesn't do the level of that justice - I mean I thought I'd accidentally tripped into a horror story at one point)
• Self harm / animal deaths / child deaths / harm basically - most of which is very upfront