Five Found Dead, Sulari Gentill

The Orient Express instantly conjures up images of luxurious travel, fine dining, people dressed in their very best, quiet and attentive staff gliding unseen and unremarked through carriages, Inspector Hercule Poirot and 12. Always 12 people.

And so it is with FIVE FOUND DEAD in which one imagines author Sulari Gentill had an enormous amount of fun constructing a story that's partly a hat tip to Agatha Christie's well known novel, and the entire golden age of mystery writing.

In this outing the 12 are the "Bar Council", a group of passengers pulled together by their backgrounds - law enforcement, private investigators, spies, a lawyer and her brother the crime writer. They are called upon by the train manager when a compartment is discovered one morning, empty of its occupant but covered in blood. Of course it's a train so that compartment will be close to somebody, but it's the lawyer and her brother Meredith and Joe - the "main characters" of this outing for want of a better description, and a recently retired French policeman who have the "honour" of being in the cabins either side of the crime scene. As the "Council" convenes to try to solve the mystery of the missing man, and what the crime scene means, a dangerous new COVID variant has been discovered, and two carriages are quarantined from the rest of the train, which also finds itself stranded between France and Italy as authorities react (badly) to this biothreat. 

So effectively we have a modern day locked room mystery, on a train, which is totally locked down because of the disease threat, making for an interesting problem for those on board, which rapidly becomes even more dangerous as more and more people in the non-quarantined part of the train start to die.

Add to that the 12 "Bar Council" members, any of whom could as easily be perpetrator as potential saviour and Meredith and Joe have their work, and their survival cut out for them.

Keen readers of crime fiction will pick a considerable number of homages in this novel, and there's even some blatantly spelt out for you, but all of this sounds complicated, and isn't. As always, Gentill has a way of putting together complex plots with verve and, one suspects, a sense of fun. Made all the more difficult it seems at the time of writing this novel, with a personal health battle of her own, played out in Joe's experience of surviving a bout of cancer, with the support of his sister. There's some twists and turns in that story as well as they both must now find a way of normalising life after a difficult experience, something that a lot of people experience, but few have written about in the manner that Gentill has tackled it.

Keener readers may also notice yet again a lot of playing about with a style of metafiction that Gentill is also rapidly making her own. To this reader's mind, less parody than homage, less undermining of convention and more celebration. 

Regardless of how you approach FIVE FOUND DEAD - as a seasoned old crime fiction reader who instantly picks the cleverly constructed homages, or as somebody who is just flat out looking for something to while away some time, this is a hugely entertaining novel, fascinatingly clever, and wonderful to have out in the world for all to enjoy.