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Murder on the Salsette puts Dillman and Masefield on a P&O passage from Bombay to London in 1908, with a death in first class and a roster of passengers carrying secrets of different sizes. Conrad Allen handles the eastbound voyage with the texture he brought to the earlier P&O Marmora book, with attention to colonial-administration passengers and to the slow shift in the social temperature as the ship passes through Suez and into the Mediterranean.
The case resolves where you expect. The pleasures, by this point in the series, are the familiar ones: the rendered geography of a particular ship, the small accumulated detail of shipboard life, the long romance between the two protagonists.
Three stars. Reliable comfort reading. Best for series fans rather than new readers.
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