Sep 7, 2016

For Day 2 of my week of referrals, I want to direct your attention to a fascinating book that’s been campaigning slowly but steadily, amassing a large following without much fanfare. Yet its success so far is no surprise at all; once you do catch sight of this book, it holds your attention from then on.

Murder at the Veterans’ Club is exactly what you hope it will be: a pure love letter to the golden age of detective fiction. Set in post WWI London, Murder at the Veterans’ Club follows Eric Peterkin as he seeks to find the truth behind the murder of a colleague, seeking the answers to a crime the police have no intention of solving.

Christopher Huang has clearly written this book out of a deep-seated love for the genre, and it shows. The tone, plot, characterization and language are all painstakingly delivered in the style of classic detective literature, resulting in a story that reads as if it were a manuscript recently pulled from a vault left sealed for 90 years.

If you yearn for a new Holmes or Poirot novel, you owe it to yourself to give Peterkin a try.