Book Review: The Spanish Diplomat’s Secret by Nev March

Private investigator and retired army captain Jim Agnihotri is crossing the Atlantic once more with the lovely Lady Diana Framji, now his bride of nearly two years. He hasn’t been one hundred percent transparent with her about why they’re heading from their home in Boston to Liverpool this summer of 1894, but he’s hoping that the real reason will end up being a nice surprise. After all, she’s clearly been keeping something from him too, a secret that’s been casting a pall over her ordinarily sunny demeanor:

Something had felt off-kilter when I got back from my last assignment. I’d returned to Diana’s usual welcome, her relief to see me intact. She’d smiled and said all the right things, but the shadows around her eyes told me she’d not had an easy time of it. Only when I shed my tramping guise and thoroughly cleaned up did she bend. She’d discarded my filthy clothing with the stern look of a quartermaster examining a broken rifle. But that was all right. So why did I hear her stifled crying that night? She’d insisted it was nothing, but I knew there was more. Why had she been so unhappy?

Respectful of her privacy but determined to restore her to happiness, Jim has booked them first-class tickets on a transatlantic crossing. He has not, however, bargained for a severe case of seasickness waylaying him on their very first evening at sea, while they’re supposed to be enjoying a ball thrown for the benefit of the first-class passengers. An older Spanish gentleman recognizes him as a fellow former soldier, and kindly assists him at the railing. 

Once Diana figures out the reason for Jim’s absence from the ballroom, she comes out to check on him and take over ministering to his needs. Sea voyages, they must ruefully conclude despite their best efforts, do not agree with his constitution. It’s looking to be a long eight-day journey for them aboard the HMS Etruria, even before the Spanish gentleman who helped Jim is found strangled to death in the ship’s music room the next afternoon.

In life, Don Juan Nepomuceno had been the governor of a Spanish province. More importantly, he was a relative of the young Spanish king. His murder on a British ship could set off a political firestorm or worse, given the two nation’s strained ties. When the Etruria’s Captain Hawley discovers that Jim is a detective attached to a well-known American agency, he immediately requests that Jim take over the investigation. The last thing Captain Hawley needs is for claims of bias to arise from entrusting the investigation to his British crew.

As Jim tries to establish why anyone would want to kill the gruff but helpful older man, he discovers far more about the don than he’d ever suspected. Much of what he learns makes him begin to question his own actions when he was a soldier:

You’re a fine one to consider this, Agnihotri, I grumbled as I staggered toward our stateroom. I’d taken part in innumerable military actions in North India. After the carnage in Maiwand, my company had been ordered to attack. Few could repel a coordinated onslaught from a professional army. In weeks we’d beaten the emir into signing a treaty.

 

I’d been proud to stand for the British Indian army. Now I recalled the glowering faces of tribesman as we rode past, read their sullen impotence. Was I upholding the law, then? I’d been so certain before.

Jim must relentlessly ask questions, not only of himself but of the richest and most powerful in first class, their servants, and the highest and lowest of the crew, if he’s to have any hope of solving this case before the ship docks in Liverpool. In this he’s ably and gamely assisted by Diana, whose perspectives differ just enough from his own to make her observations invaluable. No murderer could possibly outwit the both of them combined… but what if the killer they’re seeking is no mere mortal? As rumors of ghosts and monsters sweep across the Etruria, Jim and Diana must race against time to figure out whodunnit before the locked room strangler can claim another victim.

Shipboard murder mysteries always require a tight, well-organized timeline, which Nev March constructs here with aplomb. Jim and Diana face a formidable challenge in recreating the movements of the suspects the day the don was murdered. I enjoyed puzzling that out with them, even as I seemed to have a much easier time getting to the meaning of seemingly insignificant interactions and reports than Jim did. I did occasionally wonder whether he was written as a bit of a dullard in order to either enhance Diana’s wit by comparison, or to misdirect the gullible reader into making the same wrong assumptions he did. Any exasperation I had with his naivete quickly melted, however, in the face of his genuine concern for his charming spouse. It’s always delightful to encounter a crime-fighting partnership, fictional or otherwise, that’s just as strong in affection and mutual respect as it is in working together to see justice served.