#23. The Other Book With The Similar Plot – Murder on Lake Garda by Tom Hindle (Paperback)

As mentioned in the previous blog, this book was my friend’s holiday read which she passed to me once she’d finished with it.

I was already reading two books that I had taken with me, but one of them was a nice hardback I didn’t want ruining with sea and sand, so this seemed a perfect book to pop to the beach with. 

I wasn’t filled with much confidence as her assessment of the book was basically ‘it’s okay for a holiday read.’ By her tone, I surmised it’d be a quick easy read that wouldn’t give the old grey cells too much of a problem. Sadly, I was right, the new Agatha Christie this was not!

“One happy couple.

Two divided families.

A wedding party to die for.

 

On the private island of Castello Fiore - surrounded by the glittering waters of Lake Garda - the illustrious Heywood family gathers for a wedding to remember.

 

But as the ceremony begins, a blood-curdling scream brings the celebrations to a violent halt.

 

With the guests trapped on the island as they await the police, old secrets come to light and family rivalries threaten to explode.

 

Everyone is desperate to know . . .

 

Who is the killer?

 

And can they be found before they strike again?”

 

So, what is my issue with this book that I didn’t have with ‘The Guest List’? Well for starters I worked out who had been murdered after the first two pages…even though we hadn’t been told who had died (in two pages you haven’t been told much to be honest!) Secondly, we go back in time to two days before the murder, just so people’s back stories can be laid out before us. As soon as one of the characters said their name wasn’t short for anything, I thought, oh I imagine it is, and I wondered what the other variations of that name were, so as I ploughed on reading, I realised which one it was. The author has tried to incorporate alternate narratives to add to the tension and possibly sow seeds of doubt, but for me, the red herrings in the book turned out to be more of a pink-footed goose chase… and I’m not talking Fuchsia Pink here, more of a Blossom or Baby Pink. At least the ending made sense, if predictable, so not all was bad. In honesty, I kept reading because it was part of the challenge and to see whether my assumptions were correct. Just call me Jane Marple!

As a beach read goes, it was enjoyable enough and the setting I was in enhanced the experience. I might have been in Montenegro, but I was sat on a beach with a mountain range looming up before me, which reminded me so much of my holiday by Lake Garda several years ago. Coincidentally, I stayed in Malcesine where this book is set, and I have visited the castle where the wedding took place. The castle is actually on the mainland, but it does house a museum and a wedding was in full-swing  when we visited; the happy couple having their photos taken in the most idyllic surroundings.

For me, this setting was perhaps one of the biggest disappointments of the novel. This place was surely chosen for a reason, so why didn’t the author take me there? In ‘The Guest List’ the island became a central character, whereas in this book I could have been anywhere. I got a vague sense of what the island looked like, but I didn’t get any real sense of what it felt like, other than it being very hot and sunny. It was completely devoid of atmosphere and my senses were drawn from my past holiday, not from what was written on the page.

The plot is straightforward, Toby and his girlfriend are invited to his brother’s wedding. The family is rich and entitled, and in a similar vein to ‘The Guest List’ the wedding is an opportunity for the bride to raise her public online profile. Laurence (the groom) inherited the family company and is demanding that Toby to join the family business; Toby however dreams of opening his own bar. Eva (the bride) is an Italian influencer and her parents own a luxury car company. All the characters are one-dimensional and obnoxious except for Toby’s girlfriend Robyn.

As we know from the start of the book, the wedding doesn’t take place as a body is found before the service starts. As all bar one of the characters are unlikeable, it’s hard to have sympathy for anyone. As the murder takes place on an island, the list of suspects is short, and as the first page of the book helpfully lists who the guests are, it’s easy to use it as a tick list for narrowing down who you think the murderer is.

As the point of view shifts between the various characters, it becomes clear who could or could not have pulled off a murder, and so that tick list quickly reduces.

Robyn is essentially the opposite of everyone else, a straightforward northern girl with a strong regional accent, and is treated like the outsider she is. She has a journalism degree, but whilst she hasn’t pursued a career in journalism, it doesn’t stop her inquisitive nature as she tries to fathom out the answer to the crime.

Both sides of the family have dark secrets that are slowly uncovered, and Tom Hindle seems to have nailed the modern world of using Instagram influencers and unlikeable hedge fund managers in this novel. Unlike ‘The Guest List’ Hindle has stuck to a chronological timeframe, two days before the wedding, one day before the wedding etc, which allows you to put two and two together and come up with four. I think if he had structured the novel a little differently, I wouldn't have seen the obvious perpetrator, and I would have enjoyed the novel more.

A purely personal viewpoint on an element of the novel that I found interesting was Robyn not pursuing a career in journalism and her reason why. “It had taken some time to accept, but the truth was that her dreams hadn’t survived her studies. By the time her three years were up, she’d become so jaded by the reality of modern journalism – the bias, the misinformation, the endless drive for clicks and ad revenue – that she simply didn’t want it anymore.”  

As she’s pressured into applying for a job at a celebrity magazine she snaps back, “ ‘You mean an opportunity to write about Kardashian lookalikes and I’m a Celeb? It isn’t exactly hard-hitting journalism.’ ”

It was strange seeing those words written down. When I finished my journalism degree in the mid 1990’s, I thought similarly. I briefly worked on a local paper and was accepted to work on a teenage magazine, but I quickly realised ‘journalism’ had evolved into celebrity gossip and lengthy opinion pieces rather than enlightening the public with sobering factual news.

Back then, there wasn’t social media. Instead we had OK! Magazine, a British weekly magazine focused on celebrity gossip. It wasn’t the only magazine of that genre, but it showed where we were going as a nation. People weren’t interested on hard hitting stories on what was going on in the world, they were more interested in what colour lipstick Madonna wore on her latest tour. People had stopped caring about what was going on around them and were more interested in the lifestyles of the rich and famous. Fast forward to 2024 and the vacuous can’t sleep until they know what colour lipstick Taylor Swift is wearing on her Eras tour! I did not expect to read a murder mystery book and go down such a rabbit hole into my past!

‘Murder on Lake Garda’ is not a particularly bad book, it’s just one I didn’t feel particularly engaged with, or as my friend said, ‘it’s okay for a holiday read.’

 

Genre: Mystery, Thriller, Suspense, Crime Fiction, Murder Mystery, Contemporary Fiction

Release Date: 4^th July 2024 (paperback)

Publisher: Penguin Books

Pages: 384

 

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