Publishers John Murray have a penchant for thrillers and adventures set around the world, often written by expatriates. One example from last year was The Creator’s Map—Emilio Calderón’s tale of espionage in wartime Rome—and more recently they’ve published The Maze of Cadiz, the debut novel from Aly Monroe.

The Maze of Cadiz introduces British “economic warfare” agent Peter Cotton, who’s set to appear in a series of novels from the author. This first story sees Cotton sent to Cadiz in the closing days of the Second World War. His mission is initially to locate and relieve R A May, a British agent assigned to watch imports and exports in the port, and who seems to have gone rogue, withdrawing large sums of money and not replying to communications. Before Cotton can reach him and discover the reasons for his strange behaviour, May turns up dead. Cotton’s left to tidy up the mess, his only official contact in the region an obstructive vice-consul.

Cotton spends much of the book visiting expatriates and getting a sense of the community in which the mysterious R A May has spent his last days. There’s a chance here for Aly Monroe to draw on her own experiences of expat life in Spain, so we can expect the characters Cotton meets to be at least inspired by these experiences, if not actually drawn directly from life. The encounters are often amusing and well written, and provide the heart of the book. However, very little story takes place in these scenes, which are more focussed on observing personalities, and when Cotton does take action at the climax of the book, it’s almost unclear how he got there. The result, then, is a relatively low-key novel of incidental pleasures, intended as a gentle introduction to Monroe’s new character.

One frustrating quirk of Monroe’s style is the way she uses foreign languages in dialogue. We can assume that most of the book’s dialogue takes place in Spanish, but Monroe keeps reminding us by giving lines first in Spanish, then in English. Here, for example, is a scene in which all of the direct speech presumably takes place in Spanish:

‘What is that?’ asked Cotton.

‘It’s the old customs house,’ said the porter. ‘Now the provincial government. That stone is from the Cadiz that lies under the sea. They chipped the shells off.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘The maremoto.’

Cotton thought for a moment. Maremoto. Seaquake. ‘When was that?’ he asked.

‘Oh…’ said the porter, ‘hace mucho.‘ A long time ago.

Cotton nodded. ‘They told me that Cadiz wasn’t fought over in your war,’ he said.

‘Well, it depends what you mean by “fight”,’ said the porter. ‘En Cádiz hubo algo de bronca pero también muchas estupideces.’ There was some violence, but also many stupidities.

or again:

‘¿Adónde?’ said the taxi driver. Where to?

‘Al cementerio británico, por favor,’ said Cotton.

‘Hm. No favor about it,’ said the taxi driver huffily.

Cotton had forgotten that in Spain, please – por favor – can be taken as sarcastic.

Taken as isolated quotations, these snippets actually don’t seem so bad, almost diverting, but the constant use of the technique throughout the book is quickly tiring and repetitive. This switching between languages sometimes creates a strange impression of the characters themselves alternating between two languages: Spanish-in-English and Spanish-in-Spanish. This effect, when no such alternation has actually taken place, is a little distracting. It’s also not clear why some of these lines are in Spanish, as for the most part they aren’t particularly unusual phrases.

It might have been better just to present all of the Spanish dialogue in English, as the overall effect of Monroe’s approach to dialogue seems to be a variety of the same disease that The Creator’s Map suffered from: expat pedantry. In this case, rather than stuffing the prose with little lectures on Roman history, Monroe seems to have an urge to give us a starter course in colloquial Spanish (the second example above is a particularly good example of this, sounding not unlike an illustrative anecdote from a language book). It’s irritating, but not on the same scale as Calderón’s novel: this is just an unfortunate and distracting stylistic quirk, while the fact-stuffing of the other book actually damaged the realism of the characters themselves.

Low-key and flawed as The Maze of Cadiz may be, Monroe’s eye for character and the general atmosphere of the book make it an entertaining read, and it suggests that there’s potential in Aly Monroe and Peter Cotton. This new series may well turn out to be a cornerstone of John Murray’s range of international thrillers.

(Peter Cotton’s next adventure will apparently take him to the USA, which should sidestep the issue of using foreign language in dialogue. Afortunadamente. Fortunately.)