There is something delicious about a murder mystery that opens on a beach at the wrong end of a Greek summer, and Spirits and Whine by Lisa Troy knows exactly what to do with that setting. Sun-bleached, salt-sharp, close enough that everyone knows everyone’s business. The island town becomes a character in its own right, and I felt the heat and the hush of it long after I’d closed the book.
The premise is a clever one. Frieda, a famous influencer, is found dead on the sand only days after she posts a scathing video tearing apart a restaurant she’d visited on holiday. The video was born of spite: a petty argument with the owner’s daughter, Anastasia, blown up into something public and cruel. And then, in a twist that made me sit up, it is Anastasia herself who stumbles upon the body. If that weren’t inconvenient enough, she soon realises she can see Frieda. Talk to her. The two of them – a reluctant amateur sleuth and the ghost of the woman who tried to ruin her – set off to find the killer together.
I loved the friction of that pairing. Anastasia does not want Frieda in her life or her afterlife, and Troy resists the temptation to soften them into instant friends. The reluctance stays, needling and honest, and it gives the whole book its comic-melancholy edge. The characters are drawn with real care, even the ones I expected to be sketches turned out to have corners and contradictions.
I will be honest about the opening: it is a touch slow. The first stretch takes its time laying out the town, the players, the resentments simmering under the tourist-brochure surface. But once the pace picks up, it does not let go. I found myself unable to put it down, reading past the point where any sensible person should have switched off the lamp.
Here is where my Risk-Reader instinct betrays me, as it so often does. I read fiction the way I once audited files; scanning for the gap, the thing concealed, the assumption everyone has agreed not to question. And I guessed the killer somewhere before the final third. Ordinarily that dulls a mystery for me. Here it didn’t. Troy builds the reveal so patiently, layering motive over motive, that knowing the who only made me hungrier for the how and the why. The scaffolding held even after I’d spotted the load-bearing beam.
The writing itself is crisp, no wasted ornament, but plenty of atmosphere where it counts. It is the kind of prose that trusts its reader, and I always warm to that.
Spirits and Whine is a warm, wry, well-made mystery with a ghost at its heart and a genuine sense of place. A slow first act is its only real weakness, and it’s a small price for what follows.
Rating: 4/5
I received an advance review copy for free, and I am leaving this review voluntarily.
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