Book Review: Murder on Lake Garda, Tom Hindle

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 their son Laurence’s wedding to Italian influencer Eva Bianchi.

But as the ceremony begins, a blood-curdling scream brings the proceedings to a devastating halt.

With the wedding guests trapped as they await the police, old secrets come to light and family rivalries threaten to bubble over.

Everyone is desperate to know . . .

Who is the killer?

And can they be found before they strike again?

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A gripping twisty little thriller set in a evocative – if underused – location and populated by a range of deeply unpleasant characters, one of whom doesn’t survive much beyond the opening scene!

My first thoughts, having tried to pop a picture of the author up here just for interest and curiosity, is how incredibly young he looks! Unless I am just getting old!

Anyway, I have been feeling a little under the weather recently – few days off work and not in the right frame of mind for anything heavy to read. So I turned to that familiar genre of the crime novel, and having enjoyed Hindle’s The Murder Game settled in for something enjoyable but unchallenging and, yes, it delivered!

The plot is simple enough: Toby and his girlfriend Robyn are invited to Toby’s brother’s wedding in the Castello Fiore, situated on an island in Lake Garda. The bride and groom are rich, entitled and pretty roundly obnoxious: Laurence is a public schoolboy who inherited his father’s company – and who is insistent that his brother Toby join him there; Eva is an Italian online influencer whose parents run a luxury car business. The wedding is being used to promote Eva’s somewhat flagging profile and career so there is both a photographer and her agent there alongside the various family members and groomsmen. The wedding never takes place because a body is discovered which somewhat disrupts the proceedings. Secrets are revealed, the past is raked over, another body is discovered. And – it being an island – the guests are all trapped there until the police finally arrive.

Hindle’s narrative is primarily focussed on Robyn, the outsider in the group, and we learn about the other characters and their family tensions – there are many – through her. Which is good as she is one of the more down-to-earth and less unpleasant characters. His point-of-view does however shift to a number of other characters including the best man and the father of the bride… and every time we slipped into the point-of-view of a character we quickly came to realise that they could not have been the killer which did rapidly diminish the potential pool of suspects. And we all play the game of “Can I Work Out The Killer Before I’m Told”, don’t we? That diminished pool made that an easier game than it needed to have been.

Hindle does like to trap his characters in a limited locale whether it be the hotel of The Murder Game, the island here or the ship in A Fatal Crossing which is probably the source of the comparison with Agatha Christie – the country houses and particularly the island of And Then There Were None. I would have liked more use to have been made of the setting – it is so potentially evocative and impressive and atmospheric that it seems a shame that I cannot say I really felt the place. It was hot. It had a casermetta, it had a museum that housed a dagger… More time was spent inside the characters’ heads as they ruminated on the events and suspects than was spent on the setting. Even in the sections of the book prior to the wedding, the setting never really felt Italian…

Apart from the mafia, of course – what could be more Italian? But I did almost give an eye roll at the machinations of the mafia as they interfered with the wedding. It felt very… obvious? And a very easy inclusion to muddy the waters… But then, weren’t all the characters a little stereotyped and two-dimensional? And how credible were some of Robyn’s instincts to run off investigating the crime? And what struck me most was the fact that of the dozens of rich, entitled guests, all of whom were armed with their own mobiles on which Instagram was browsed to make a plot point, not a single one thought to call the police themselves as they endured hours of waiting on the say-so on one single wedding planner…

So, overall, it was not the deepest or most profound book in the world, nor did it have the charm of some of these cosy crime capers… but it was enjoyable and unchallenging and that absolutely was what I was looking for from it! Will I pick up a copy of Hindle’s A Fatal Crossing? I probably shall… but I may not be rushing out to get it.