The Drowned Man

March 4, 2013
In Whellams’s busy second Peter Cammon mystery (after 2012’s Walking into the Ocean), the apparently straightforward task of escorting a murdered colleague’s body from Montreal to England proves anything but for the retired Scotland Yard inspector. The coroner’s report asserts that John Carpenter drowned after he had already suffered fatal internal damage from being struck from behind by a car. The motive for the crime involves three letters of great historical value if authentic: one was allegedly written by John Wilkes Booth a few months before Lincoln’s assassination; the others were written to Booth. These letters are missing, along with a beautiful woman with whom Carpenter was traveling. The cross-border action includes a brutal sexual assault (of questionable relevance), a suicide, the Quebec separatist movement, Montreal mobsters, the News of the World phone-hacking scandal, and cricket fixing. Whellams fails to tie these wide-ranging issues together satisfactorily.