Gwen Moffat lives in Cumbria. Her novels are set in remote communities ranging from the Hebrides to the American West. The crimes fit their environment, swelling that dreadful record of sin in the smiling countryside cited by Sherlock Holmes.
With this one Hannah has up-dated the Golden Age with a puzzle and all the trimmings. There is a select resort, a Lord, a multi-million-pound Will and anonymous warning letters leading to the stabbing of the peer’s daughter. There is a plethora of suspects all with unassailable alibis, a comic pair of married cops and, in a final nod to the twenties, the concept of murder as fun.
Forget noir and the current dirge of plague and gloomy scandals and concentrate on the puzzle.
Clues and red herrings proliferate and it is essential to distinguish between them. There is help to hand. In emails (many un-Sent) and soliloquys the protagonist, Lucy Dean, presents herself as an embittered woman betrayed by a husband who left her and her new baby to move in with Jane, the siren destined to be the victim.
After the murder Lucy is the more obvious suspect but not only is her alibi water-tight, it is superfluous as she is able to convince the reader that there was no way she could have killed her husband’s lover. In fact she wasn’t there – but her husband was. So he is the prime suspect until calculations involving distance, trajectories, and blood spatter clear him.
The cops have definite but conflicting views. Lucy has her own doubts because, if everyone has an alibi, given that this is a closed community, then Jane was killed by someone with a false alibi. Lucy sees the danger, her instinct for self-preservation kicks in and she starts to investigate herself, concentrating on the obvious: she didn’t kill Jane so it must have been her husband, but she still loves him. Perhaps it was an accident rather than murder.
Driven by her compulsion to discover the truth Lucy – and the plot – now focus on the evening of the murder when a group of people were dining at individual tables. It was the siting of those tables, their inexplicable movements, the sinister warnings regarding them and their occupants, that is emphasised throughout the book. Clue or laboured distraction? After the diners were seated an expensive bottle of champagne was taken to the wrong table. The cops were accused of stealing it. There were hysterics, people came and went, coalesced…
The bizarre denouement is good but not striking enough to compensate for the longueurs. The Couple at the Table is an experiment that doesn’t come off.
