A Pretender's Murder

I love a good mystery. All the better when there are moments of suspense and when there are reveals one after the other. In A Pretender’s Murder by Christopher Huang, we get just that. Eric is, was, a soldier in the Great War, a war that he and millions of others are still reeling from seven years later. And as he pieces his life back together, he finds himself with a new job in a gentleman’s club as the secretary, the old one gone after a murder. And yet only weeks into Eric’s new position, he is faced with another one. And just as he had a hand in solving the previous one, he decides to take this one on as well.

Let me start off by saying that it took a little while before I got into the novel. This is probably because I am unused to the author’s style and thanks to it being an ARC there were a lot of editing and formatting issues that caught my attention more than what was happening on the page. That’s right, I received an advanced reader’s copy (a digital one, at that) in exchange for an honest review. And so here goes my review!

Stars: 4/5

I love how involved Huang’s world is and that he never gives us more information than is absolutely necessary to either understand a character, a line of thinking, or misdirect us. His protagonist is half-Chinese, but fully removed from that half of his culture as his mother thought she had to erase that part of herself in order to be English…something that Eric laments. Moreover, a former lieutenant in the army, he is dealing with PTSD and we get bouts of him superimposing war scenes into the present moment.

Another thing that really makes this interesting for me is the fact that Eric initially wants nothing to do with the case. Sure, it involved someone he knew personally, it happened in his workplace, and people know he’s capable. But he wants nothing to do with violence anymore. Yet, when he realizes that the police are just mucking it up, and at the behest of those around him, he gets to work. Something about an unwilling hero has always been appealing to me. Add in the espionage, the betrayal, the misogyny, and you’ve got a pretty good story.

Eric along with his friend Avery, a quartet of widows, his sister, and an alienist take matters into their own hands, piecing together what they can of the dead Colonel’s life. That gets harder to do as more and more comes to the forefront. I won’t give any spoilers but I appreciate how the author uses the opinions of the time he sets his story in to help us navigate. It makes the world more believable. Of course Eric feels distant and isn’t entirely welcome at the Britannia club at first, he’s half-Chinese. He didn’t even grow up in England! The fact that he fought for the country does nothing to ingratiate him to his peers. Moreover, time and time again, Eric and everyone else tend to underestimate the women in the novel, something commonplace both then and now. They act as though a woman in her twenties is a child, that no woman could have a sex life, and on and on…leading to more than a few misunderstandings.

As I said, it took me a while to get into the story, but once I was in, I was sat. I hope that the formatting issues are all taken care of before publishing because it made some passages hard to understand, making it hard to retain. And I am one of those readers who grew up watching shows like Scooby Doo and Murder, She Wrote. I like trying to solve the mystery as I read. And with this novel, the mysteries kept piling up.

On another note, the narrative tone is a bit dry but it actually suits the initial portrayal of Eric and develops more as the plot progresses. This may be a series I keep in my TBR.