A murder story set on a Norwegian fjord cruise? I couldn’t hardly turn that down, especially getting it cheap. I assumed it was a sort of a mystery, but it’s more of a suspense story. The mystery in One Green Bottle isn’t whodunnit, but who didn’t?

The tour guides leading a group of cruise ship hikers up a mountain in Norway assure them that they’ve never lost a customer. Well, that’s about to end. They’ve hit a perfect storm today, because there are eight people in this particular party, nearly all of whom are planning to kill either themselves or someone else.

There’s an English couple getting away from home for a while to deal with the tenth anniversary of their only daughter’s death. The experience is complicated by the husband’s growing conviction that his wife is having an affair with another man – who just happens to show up with his own wife on this cruise (surprise)! There’s an American financier planning suicide because he knows his embezzlement is even now being discovered by his co-workers. And a psychopathic American heiress worried that her alcoholic sister will blab to the police about how they murdered their father.

Yet we learn at the beginning of the book that only one of them actually dies. Which one will it be?

There’s much to admire in One Green Bottle. The prose is good. The characters are admirably faceted – the most sympathetic among them can be annoying, and the most annoying have sympathetic moments. The story was fascinating and engaging.

But it left a rather sour taste in my mouth. This is a fictional universe whose God, if there is a God, is Irony.

I recommend it moderately. Cautions for language and disturbing themes.