Following the conclusion of the excellent Adventures on Trains series by M.G. Leonard and Sam Sedgman, I — no doubt along, one suspects, with children’s publishers — was keen for another dose of transport-based juvenile mystery-making. And so at the start of the Mysteries at Sea series by A.M. Howell do we find ourselves.

Interestingly, Howell sets Peril on the Atlantic (2023) in 1936, where 12 year-old Alice Townsend is about to join her seaman father for the very first time for a trans-Atlantic voyage on the passenger liner Queen Mary. Alas, Staff Captain Townsend won’t have much time for his daughter, as he is hoping to make the crossing to America in record time and thus secure plaudits, business, and promotion. And so, despite instructions that she should confine herself only to a small area of the ship, Alice goes a-wandering and overhears some threats being made to one of the ship’s crew; that young crewman is then pushed down some steps and left in critical condition, and Alice determines to find the man responsible and bring him to justice.

Howell sets this up quickly and well, with the emotional distance between father and daughter well-established…

They saw each other so rarely that she sometimes felt they were like two different species, a tree and a bird perhaps, as they adjusted to one another after being apart. Spending more time together might close that gap.

…making it clear why Alice feels conflicted about going against his wishes, but the sheer moral wrongness of harming another person proving sufficient motivation to flout the expectations laid down. She is helped in both aspects of this by a couple of boys who work on the ship and have their own connections with the injured teenager, and the three of them — soon boosted to four by a Jewish girl whose family are fleeing Hitler’s regime in Germany — work intelligently to find the culprit and the deeper reason behind their crime.

Along the way. we of course Learn Some Things About Society…

“First-class passengers, like Sonny, are free to wander wherever they like. They just need to ask a member of the crew to let them through the locked doors to second and third-class areas. It doesn’t work the other way around though,” Charlie replied simply.

“But that’s hardly fair,” said Alice with a frown, as the three of them slipped through the door and Charlie locked it behind them.

“Money opens doors,” said Charlie with a shrug.

…and, inevitably, as the mystery deepens and darkens, these juvenile sleuths find out that they’re taking on something bigger and are against people who will use underhanded tactics to triumph.

Some of what’s here really is pleasing from the perspective of children trying to solve a mystery — for instance, at one key stage, they stand around discussing their just-made discoveries only for the people they’re discussing to have followed them and thus overhear everything they’re saying. In an adult mystery novel that would be infuriating, but the fact that kids doubtless would make that sort of mistake feeds nicely into the world of this. Occasionally, too, Howell really gets beneath the skin of the people and the stage she’s working on, often with a little aside or an incidental detail of zero importance that just makes everything breathe:

Her father was telling her facts about the ship — like that there were thirty thousand light bulbs on board, and that before the ship’s maiden voyage, 15,000 people paid five shillings to come aboard for a visit and every single ashtray had been stolen as a souvenir.

Less successfully…well, I dunno quite how to put this. Where the likes of Leonard and Sedgman seemed to really understand young kids and write about them from a position of knowledge, it feels like Howell has heard of kids but mostly knows about them because of a poorly-facsimiled book badly translated from Icelandic 80 years ago. She writes about them at arm’s length, with any difficulties overcome more because the adults are foolish than because of any earned intelligence on the core trio’s behalf. And the one difficulty that can’t be overcome like that — in chapter 22 — has to deus ex machina itself away so that we’re not stuck with nothing doing.

And, hey, that’s all fine — we read these books for adventure and intrigue, not for realistic examinations of the childhood psyche and its various failings when placed in an adult world — but Howell for me, for the vague reasons above, doesn’t really feel like she knows kids or what makes them compelling as protagonists. There are a lot of short narrative arcs in this, reminding me of The Murderer’s Ape (2014) by Jakob Wegelius, and most of them are dismissed as easily as in that book. The struggles are minimal, the odds largely fine, and most of the adults just go along with it and things work out.

There’s also a real lack of intrigue in the final third, with the scheme clear by then and mostly some creeping around, hiding, and being chased to wrap it all up. You could skip about nine or ten chapters and still be quite secure in telling someone what happened in each one, and I think that’s a shame: the mystery of a pair of matching gloves isn’t enough to sustain the interest for the final section…and, to this adult reader, it all fell into a rather expected pattern, with no real driving curiosity to keep me interested. But, then, I am a good 30 years older than the intended audience, so my perspective on these things isn’t always the most helpful.

So, well, I finish Peril on the Atlantic a little conflicted.  I’d hoped to love this and have found another — albeit short, with currently only three books in it — series to explore, but for all it does well I’m not convinced these books are walking the line I’m interested in. This first entry is breezily-written and passed quickly, but the world conjured up within needs more dust in the corners to really compel. I’m not saying I won’t return, but equally don’t be surprised if I only booked a one-way ticket where these travel-based shenanigans are concerned.