Notes on a Murder by B.P. Walter

Published by HarperCollins UK, One More Chapter on November 23, 2023

The reader learns two important facts in the early pages of Notes on a Murder. First, twenty years earlier, Oliver drugged a man, rolled his body into a rug, and dumped him into the sea. Second, the man is alive.

In the present, while Oliver is at a wellness center taking a break from his pill addiction, Oliver sees Aaistair, the man he thought he murdered. Intercut with scenes from the present, Oliver narrates a backstory that explains his relationship with Alastair. Oliver is telling this story to Alastair, which seems odd to me since Alastair doesn’t need to be told things he already knows. “It turned out that you were an orphan,” Oliver says. Alastair knows he’s an orphan. Why is Oliver telling him that? Making Alastair the audience of Oliver’s narration struck me as a poor choice.

Oliver met Alastair in Greece, where Oliver was spending the summer with his parents and brother. Alastair picked up Oliver at a bar and they went off to Alastair’s hostel to have sex. Over the course of the summer, Oliver falls in love with Alastair and begins to plan a life with him. Alastair professes similar feelings in a casual way that suggests Alastair is merely having a summer fling.

Oliver might be into Alastair because they are so much alike — both intelligent, handsome blondes who have similar interests. When Alastair suggests that Oliver is essentially having sex with himself, he may be revealing the truth of Oliver’s narcissistic personality.

Oliver and his brother Douglas were concerned that their father was behaving strangely during their stay in Greece. They happened upon their father while he was having a business lunch with Argento and Nita, Argento’s hired companion. Oliver’s father was always secretive about his business dealings and was unhappy that his sons saw him with Argento. We eventually see a snippet of Argento’s relationship with Oliver’s father, but B.P. Walter frustrates the reader by failing to explain how, and to what extent, Oliver’s father was mixed up with Argento.

Douglas is quite taken with Nita when she brings his family a fruit basket. When Oliver and Alastair run into Argento on the beach, he invites them to visit him for dinner at his villa on a nearby island. They make return visits, sometimes with Douglas in tow, fueling Douglas'desire to shag Nita, a desire that is heightened by her habit of swimming in the nude.

Oliver witnesses a murder during his first visit. On repeated visits, he realizes that Argento is a serial killer who believes his victims deserve to die. As the story progresses, Oliver and Alastair each become witnesses to more deaths. Argento works to transform the young men, to persuade them to kill as he has, to take justice into their own hands.

Notes on a Murder is an interesting story told in fluid prose. My inability to buy into the premise prevents me from giving it a full recommendation. The ease with which Oliver decides that murder is justified, simply because Argento tells him that his victims were horrible people (sometimes supported by video evidence), might explain why Oliver felt justified in making his unsuccessful attempt to kill Alastair, but their prompt bonding after Alastair returns from the dead struck me as unlikely.

Argento’s willingness to let strangers in on his secret hobby is beyond unlikely. Walter offers no satisfactory explanation of Alastair’s ability to get away with serial killings. The novel’s ending is no more probable than the plot that precedes it. And since no significant character has any moral compass, I found it difficult to care about the decisions they made. While well written and interesting, the story has too many weaknesses to earn a full recommendation.

RECOMMENDED WITH RESERVATIONS