Orders to Kill: The compelling WWI murder mystery series (Home Front Detective)

by Edward Marston

December 1917. Ada Hobbes arrives on a frosty morning to clean the house owned by Dr Tindall, a surgeon at the Edmonton Military Hospital. She is shocked to find the blood-covered body of her employer sprawled across the floor. He has been hacked to death.

Detective Inspector Harvey Marmion and Sergeant Joe Keedy arrive to a horrific scene. Someone enjoyed killing him, without a doubt. Their investigation takes them far out of London and on the trail of a very different Dr Tindall, one who was not the respectable local doctor everyone thought he was. Marmion and Keedy will need to sift through a number of likely suspects to find the killer behind this gruesome murder.

• ISBN10: 0749026995
• ISBN13: 9780749026998
• Publish Date: 21 October 2021
• Publish Status: Out of Print
• Out of Print: 8 June 2022
• Publish Country: GB
• Imprint: Allison & Busby
• Format: Hardcover
• Pages: 320
• Language: English

Reviews

[annieb123]

Originally posted on my blog: Nonstop Reader.

Orders to Kill is the 9th historical procedural mystery in the Home Front Detective series by Edward Marston. Released 21st Oct 2021 by Alison & Busby, it's 320 pages and is available in hardcover and ebook formats. It's worth noting that the ebook format has a handy interactive table of contents as well as interactive links. I've really become enamored of ebooks with interactive formats lately.

This is a well written historical series and this installment sees inspectors Marmion and Keedy investigating the particularly brutal murder of a revered orthopedic surgeon. It's set in London during WWI and the inspectors will travel outside their home precincts to find the guilty and bring them to justice.

Despite being the 9th in the series, it works well as a standalone and there are no huge spoilers for the earlier books if read out of order. This is a well written and engaging series, however, the writing is uneven in places and there are a few instances of dialogue which yanked me out of my suspension of disbelief. The end conflict, denouement, and resolution were a trifle two dimensional and flat. There was very little sense of danger. There were also some plot threads which seemed tacked on and could have been trimmed down and streamlined without problem (Alice and Iris' entire interaction and shopping trip, for example).

All in all, though, the author is quite competent and the mystery is a light and engaging one.

Three and a half stars. This would be a good choice for fans of historical British police procedural mysteries.

Disclosure: I received an ARC at no cost from the author/publisher for review purposes.