Inspector French: Fatal Venture (Book 15) Paperback – February 28, 2023

Oh dear. The mystery part of this book is all right - not one of FWC's best tales but good enough.The premise on which the whole story is based is, sadly, pure hokum, and that undermines the story in its entirety. The ship operators never owned the ship! The story depends on the acquisition of an old Atlantic crossing ship - when the team discusses the acquisition on a train they are overheard and the interloper gets in with an option to buy the ship, in the name of his company. When the would-be ship operators turn up to make an offer, they pretend to be officers of the interloper's company and the seller signs the contract. Then everything goes forward as though the operators have purchased the ship. Nonsense. They had no legal right to sign a contract on behalf of the interloper's company - they are neither its shareholders nor its officers - so the contract is is null and void, and the interloper still has the right to buy the ship in the name of what is in fact, and always has been, his company. Even had the contract been enforceable the ship would have been owned by the interloper's company not by the would-be operators. Argggh! In fact I can see no way in which they could possible have become the owners of the ship, so everything that follows related to the ship is complete nonsense.FWC sometimes does show his total lack of understanding of the commercial world, and this is the worst SNAFU I have seen in his oeuvre so far. There was a previous book where he clearly believed that when quoted stocks are sold on the stock market it affects the amount of money available to the company to conduct its operations - wrong, unless the company was issuing new shares, which was not the case. I did not mention that in my review of that book because if did not effect the story materially, but this lack of research by FWC is always annoying when it happens as it always undermines the story to some extent. This instance I could not pass over.Back to the story - it is good to see that FWC realised that French's wife did not need to be just a faceless housewife, and although she does not get involved overmuch in the story, at least she has a voice. What else - well, yet again, at the end, FWC is in such a hurry to get away that he fails to close everything off. Of the three ship operators one was murdered, one was hanged and the third ended up married but unemployed - fine, but did that one get the 10% of the profits from the ship operations he was promised or not? Obviously he married into money, but why leave things hanging like that, especially as the profit sharing caused so much trouble throughout the story.Maybe I am being too picky about the ending, but frankly since none of this could have happened unless the operators had owned the ship, which they clearly never did, I would not recommend this book. So 3 stars is really generous I would say.

A good story as usual from Freeman Wills Croft.Reveals ‘whodunnit’ in the earlier book, Inspector French and the Loss of the ‘Jane Vosper’, so read that one first! :-)