Reviews of 'DEATH IN THE ANDAMANS'

Here are some newspaper reviews of Night On The Island (re-issued as Death in the Andamans (1985)) when the book was originally published in 1960. Here is a sample:

On the inside of dusjacket: "A visit to the Mariposas, a group of exotic islands off the East Coast of Africa, was Jan Vernon's idea of bliss. Staying with her friend Valerie Masson, whose father was Chief Commissiner, she fell in love with the islands' lush and brilliant beauty, with the easy, delightful life, and still more she fell in love with Nicolas Tarrent, R.N., visiting officer from H.M.S. Peridot.

Neither Jan nor any of the guests at the Masson's Christmas house-party could have foreseen that this enchanted eixstence was about to be violently disrupted. Yet starting with the ominous dawn of Christmas Eve, fear, suspicion and growing horror - the horror that comes only with murder, and the certainty of a murderer's presence - took hold of Jan and her companions on the island.

M. M. Kaye's latest crime novel is full of the atmosphere of its tropical setting, while the story, with its romantic as well as exciting situations, is made the more gripping by its lively characters. Like her last novel, House of Shade, Night on the Island is a spirited and thrilling crime story."

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'Murders among the close circle around the Residency in a group of Indian Ocean Islands.  Nice people displaying their nastier sides under the strain of mutual suspicion and uncertainty, and the tropical background effortlessly and effectively authentic.' Evening Standard, 19 April 1960

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' I have a very large, dry bone to pick with Miss M M Kaye, author of NIGHT ON THE ISLAND, a well-planned thriller (three corpses and the right murderer) set on a remote island in the Indian Ocean.  My bone is Miss Kaye's appalling style, with which she does not appear to take the slightest trouble.  "Charles," she write, "was a tall, fair young man of a type frequently described by female novelists as 'clean-limbed'".  Well, what has she done but describe Charles as "clean-limbed" = and then try to put the blame on someone else?  That, Miss Kaye, is the way to nauseate readers - and to do so would be a pity because there is something quite edible beneath all this rancid cream.' Illustrated London News, 23 June 1960 E. D. O'Brien