Other reviewers have commented that this book tries to be too many things at once, which I think is a valid criticism - it is thriller, historical novel, and mystery, and doesn't necessarily do a great job at any of them. Suffers a little bit from some info dumps at the beginning which slowed down the pace of the book. For me the biggest problem came halfway through, when

Spoiler

it's revealed that not only is the murderer a psychopath, he's a German agent

; that transformed the book from plausible (after all, what do I know about Malta's crime rate in WWII?) to "when is it getting a movie option?" - and I stopped trusting that the conclusion was going to make sense or pack an emotional impact for me.

Additionally, the author's reliance on British military men as viewpoint characters was problematic: I hadn't realized how much I was missing a diverse POV until he introduced a Maltese POV character towards the end, who was far more interesting - and living in a far more interesting world - than Max, the main POV character. (The other POV character, of course, being the murderer; these sections were okay, but did mean that

Spoiler

it rapidly became apparent that there were going to be no surprises about the reason for the killings [although they did introduce the secondary motive, which as mentioned above I found implausible] or the type of person the killer was; I think the lack of ambiguity hurt the mystery

.)

As others have mentioned, the female characters are pretty stock characters (

Spoiler

there's the kinky-sex-loving evil married woman Max is having an affair with, versus the half-Maltese probably-virginal spirited newspaperwoman he's actually in love with, plus side characters, like the hardboiled British plotter, who are introduced and then never seen again

) which bothered me a fair amount. If the book had been written in the eighties, fine, but especially in thrillers which are about the victimization of women, it feels uneven to have even the main female characters appear only as passive or motivational figures.

All these criticisms aside, I sped my way through the book and it held my attention the entire time. Very readable and I learned a lot about Malta in World War II.