A review by kitnotmarlowe
A Fatal Crossing by Tom Hindle

dark mysterious slow-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? Plot
• Strong character development? No
• Loveable characters? No
• Diverse cast of characters? No
• Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

1.25

I am about to say something so controversial yet so brave, and it is that Birch and Temple have wild sexual chemistry. I am absolutely positive that this was not Tom Hindle's intention and is entirely the result of the gay prion disease that has taken over my brain, but it improved my reading experience significantly. Had one of these characters been a woman, they would have fucked nasty mid-investigation. They should have fucked nasty mid-investigation regardless.

 

However, it is not hard to elevate this novel, even if it's through my own delusions since A Fatal Crossing is not a good book. I have a pretty high tolerance for terrible historical mysteries, but this may be in the top five worst historical mysteries I have ever read, and I have read dogshit like you wouldn't even believe.

 

For starters, at least 100 pages could be cut without consequence. The timeline spans five days but feels like five years. The chapters are relatively short, but the action is so repetitive that it becomes cyclical, dragging on like Hector's corpse around the walls of Troy. Every chapter goes like this:

Birch strokes the yellow ribbon and remembers his missing daughter; he and Temple argue (sexually); they speak with a suspect and receive little useful information; they argue again (sexually), and Birch's old war wound flares up. 

There's no reason for this to be nearly 500 pages long, especially since the characters (except Temple, who doesn't even have the decency to be the protagonist) are as lifeless as canned sardines. They're so generic that they're not worth keeping track of. By the end, I neither fully knew nor cared who was the murderer and who was murdered.

 

The prose is laughably repetitive. Each chapter repeats the same information about the ship's tonnage and splendour. I do not want to hear about a grand staircase ever again. Temple is constantly growling, sneering, scowling, or snarling. Nothing happens until the last 50 pages when I already lost interest. The twist at the end is the worst I've read since The Shape of Darkness by Laura Purcell. It's done almost entirely for shock value. Hindle does some decent character work in the final quarter, and once the relationship between Birch and Temple reaches its natural narrative conclusion, Hindle destroys it in the dumbest way possible. Unsatisfying and unearned. 

Sidenote: we learn that after Birch's daughter disappeared/was abducted/vanished into the ether, his wife blamed him entirely for not being there even though he was doing his job ON AN OCEAN LINER??? Miss girl, what were YOU doing that allowed your daughter to be abducted from right underneath your nose?