“I didn’t want something affordable – I wanted something luxurious”, says a character at the outset of Gerard James Borg’s glitzy new whodunnit . Yet divorce is “a slow poison”, and is an amalgamation of both poison and party that wriggles and writhes like a snake. It’s a pacy and intriguing work of popular fiction which you can imagine rolling out on screen as holiday thriller, in the style of Netflix’s .
The whodunnit flourished between World Wars I and II, a Golden Age of detective fiction, and an era that, for the rich, revolved around extravagant parties, opulent fashion, and indulgent lifestyles. And while set in a remote luxury Xagħra villa upgraded to a brash “prism of glass” with a Baroque Red Room centrepiece, Borg’s latest novel has undertones of both Agatha Christie mystery and the grandiose conspicuous consumption of . And just as F.
Scott Fitzgerald’s classic was a social satire of the Roaring Twenties, Borg questions the value of overt displays of wealth in Malta a hundred years later as his characters deliberate, irony-free, over the correct type of champagne to accompany the “devilled quail eggs topped with Ossetra caviar” and muse that a “body-skimming aqua sheath from Valentino” speaks of “a Mercedes and a palatial home with a handsome, mighty, money-machine of a man.” “All my books,” says Borg, “are packed with luxury brands and the trapping of a lavish lifestyle. I like to take the reader on a trip to another w.
