The Information Officer

The Information Officer is a novel by Mark Mills set in Malta during World War II, which immediately gives it an exotic quality that grabs the reader. I didn't know, for instance, that Malta was the most heavily bombed spot during the entire war.

The book is a hybrid between a war story and a murder mystery. Young girls, called "sherry queens" for their frequenting of bars, are turning up murdered. When one has the bars ripped from a British submariner's uniform clutched in her hand, the local information officer, Major Max Chadwick, gets involved. He is told to back off by his superiors, but in the best tradition of amateur sleuths, he is unable to.

Mills intersperses the efforts by Chadwick with chapters from the killer's perspective. We learn that he feels no emotion, and is also a double-agent for the Germans. The possibilities of who the killer is are limited, but Mills manages to keep things interesting--just when I thought it was too easy to figure out, he threw me a curve.

The book also has some romantic intrigue--Max is sleeping with the wife of a submarine commander (who might be the killer) while romancing a local girl. This seems like padding (the book is a brief 276 pages). More interesting is the authentic-seeming depictions of what life was like on that tiny island during the war.