Whodunnit

with a difference

Murder on the Mataniko Bridge. By Ann M. Kengalu.

Published by Dellaponte, P.O.

Box 458, Honiara, Solomon Islands. Price $6 Not far from the Honiara public library is the Mataniko Bridge, a single-lane, wartime structure with a narrow walk way for pedestrians.

There, on a rainy night, when the Mataniko River was brim ming its banks, an expatriate in a peaked cap and a rain coat met a young New Zealand volunteer called Peter Macdo nald, stabbed him, and pushed his body into the river.

The expatriate escaped out to sea in a dinghy with an outboard motor. Next morning, some Ontong Java people found Macdonald’s body on a sandbank at the mouth of the river. Later, $lO,OOO was found in his bank account . . .

Where had Macdonald’s wealth come from, why had he been murdered and who was the expatriate who did him in?

These are the mysteries to be unravelled in Murder on the Mataniko Bridge, a new con tribution to the extremely small shelf of South Seas detective fiction. The author, who lives in Honiara, is a former New Zealander married to an Ontong Java man.

Her thriller is the first to come out of the Solomons since Georgina Seton’s Bring An other Glass of 1944.

The story revolves around Catherine Macdonald, the mur-

der victim’s sister, who goes to the Solomons a couple of years after the murder to try to establish that his wealth was obtained honestly.

The story unfolds briskly, if not always entirely plausibly, with much of it centred on Honiara’s principal meeting place, the Hotel Mendana.

Catherine also goes on a trip to Ontong Java, falls in love with an Anglican missionary, and learns about a rare shell called Cypraea guttata and a theory that the lost “almiranta” of the Spanish explorer Menda na ended its days on an Ontong Java reef.

This is a thriller with a differ ence by a writer of talent. The burgeoning love affair between Catherine and the missionary is especially well described.

Robert Langdon.