Death on the Caldera

Emily Paxman
Completed 5/12/2026, Reviewed 5/19/2026
3 stars

This was an in-person book club read from an author who spoke at WorldCon last year.  It’s described as Murder on the Orient Express with witches.  It sort of is, as it is a murder mystery that takes place on a train.  Gotta love those publishing houses that find it necessary to compare a new book to one or a cross between several classics.  I haven’t read Orient Express, though I’ve seen one of the films, so I can’t really compare, but it felt much different.  There was no master sleuth and there were way too many characters and suspects.  Taking it at face value, the book is good, not great, but a decent enough mystery to warrant further readings of this author.

Two brothers and a sister travel on a train to get back to their home country as their father, the king, lays dying.  Kellen, the eldest, will presumably take the throne upon their father’s death.  Being the eldest, he was estranged from his younger siblings, Morel and Davina.  At the beginning of the journey, their relationships are strained, particularly Davina, the self-absorbed youngest, who is violently antagonistic towards Kellen.  She wants to go away to university, but neither her father nor Kellen will permit it.  One night, the engine car explodes in a fireball and is shrouded in rock, derailing the train on the enormous volcanic caldera, a source of magic and reverence by all the nations living on this island continent.  All clues indicate the crash was caused by a witch.  The crash triggers Davina to change into her witch persona, something she did not know she had.  After changing back, she has no memory of the crash or the change.  Kellen has been withholding this info since their mother died when Davina was very young.  She is now fully enraged and resentful of not being told the truth.  In the meantime, survivors of the crash are slowly being killed off.  They blame a witch and set out to find out who among them is the witch.  Davina, now scared she may be the murderer, puts aside some of her rage to work with her brothers who lead the effort to find who the actual witch is.  Can they divert attention away from Davina long enough to find the culprit?

A few other details that are important to know about the plot.  The king and his family remain anonymous, not using their real names in public.  Legend has it that if the general public found out the identity of the royal family members, the main god would destroy humanity, worse than the last caldera eruption.  It turns out there is one person who knows the identity of one of the family.  That person ends up on the train as well.  

The toughest part of the book is reading the parts from Davina’s POV.  She is so spoiled and self-absorbed, I cringed through the whole beginning.  At the age of nineteen, she had no redeeming qualities.  Fortunately, the crash comes and the fear of being the killer witch and the effort of Kellen to protect her allays most of her resentments.  She almost becomes likable.  The best thing about her is that we learn the magic system of this world through her coming to grips with her witchhood.  The stress on her comes from the fact that another nation executes witches, despite the fact that they saved most of the people on the continent from the last major eruption of the caldera.  Without witches, everyone would have been wiped out.  Still, witches are at best under constant suspicion throughout the empire.  

At book club, a lot of people didn’t like Kellen.  They thought him the source of the family dysfunction.  Coming from a family that kept a lot of secrets, I didn’t blame him as much as the pressure put on him by his role as heir apparent and the promises he made to his mother.  I felt bad for him, thinking he was doing his best.  I also thought Morel was likeable as the one who helped raise Davina as best he could.  To his chagrin, she just didn’t turn out to be a nice person.  

There are many characters aboard the train, though quite a few die in the explosion.  Most of the survivors have secrets, like in any good mystery.  And of course, this being a rather Victorian setting, there are many fops and stuffy, titled people.  One such fop, Carey, was actually an endearing, but still suspicious character.  There’s Emeth, the religious acolyte who is uncomfortable in his own skin.  I liked eight-year-old Rae and her mother who were leaving their home under suspicious circumstances.  Rae seems to have an affinity towards witchy-ness.  

The mystery itself is pretty good as more survivors show up murdered.  And the digging into the history of witches and magic on the caldera is more fascinating than I expected.  I give this book three stars out of five.  The book could have used some serious proofreading.  There were many spelling mistakes and missing words.  All in all, not bad for a first novel.  I’d like to see where Paxman goes after this.