The Drowned Man

Written by David Whellams

Small in stature, but large in ability, Scotland Yard Chief Inspector Peter Cammon is once again called out of retirement in The Drowned Man by David Whellams. Cammon is asked to escort a murdered colleague’s body from Montreal to London, a job he considers below his pay grade. When he arrives in Montreal, he discovers this case is anything but ordinary. The victim, the ME decrees, was murdered twice—run down by a car, then drowned in a canal. Just before his death, he had purchased three Civil War documents, one signed by John Wilkes Booth. Now the documents have disappeared and so has the victim’s traveling companion—a beautiful, mysterious woman, about whom little is known. With the help of his amateur sleuth daughter-in-law, Cammon searches for answers while moving, against his superior’s direct orders, from Montreal to London to Washington, DC, and back.

Whellams has created a delicious villainess who manages to stay one or even two steps ahead of super-sleuth Cammon in the second of the Peter Cammon mysteries. Historians and travel buffs will delight in his discourses on Montreal’s sites, politics, and history, but others may find his sometimes professorial tone a bit off-putting. Those who enjoyed the family dynamics in the first of the series, Walking Into the Ocean, will be pleased that Cammon’s wife Joan, son Michael, and daughter-in-law Maddy have reappeared. And he’s added a new member to his family: a lovable yellow lab named Jasper. While the story line is intriguing, this book may not be for everyone. A gratuitous sexual assault occurs for no particular reason and the excellent plot is encumbered with so many subplots that Whellams seems unable to resolve all of them in the space allotted to this novel.