Review of The
Murderer’s Ape
Sally Jones is an engineer aboard the ship The Hudson
Queen. She is intelligent, thoughtful, caring, and excellent at her job. She
also happens to be a gorilla.
Sally Jones’s adventure begins in Lisbon, where her closest
and only friend, Henry Koskela, is wrongly arrested on suspicion of murdering a
man named Alphonse Morro. At first she despairs, but when she discovers that
Morro may actually be alive, she sets off on a life-changing quest to India to
find him and prove her friend’s innocence.
Despite her inability to speak, Sally Jones makes a
wonderful protagonist. You feel sorry for her when her best friend gets taken
away from her, you feel joy when she finds new companions and a place to stay,
and you root for her as she begins her quest to find Alphonse Morro. As we
follow her from Lisbon to Cochin, she befriends a young woman, learns how to
make accordions, and plays a maharajah in a game of chess.
From a spoilt and wealthy maharajah to a humble accordion
maker in Lisbon, this book is full of multi-layered, complex characters that
pull you deeper into the story. Even the characters that only appear for a few
pages are believable and interesting. The Murderer’s Ape is a tale of adventure, loss, loyalty,
and determination. I was gripped from the very start. The characters are
believable and multi- dimensional, the plotline is gripping, and the
description is detailed and evocative. The Murderer’s Ape can be enjoyed by anyone
of any age.
