Murder on the Airship

 Murder on the Airship- Victoria Bergman

Stonehenge Circle  Press

Release Date: March 12, 2026

Rating: 📚📚📚📚

Synopsis: An emergency landing, quarreling elven and naga nobility, meddlesome dwarven officials, renegade pixies, dubious mercenaries, and a dragon who cheats at cards.

Bad enough without a murder.

Thyria had signed on to protect passengers, not investigate them. But she takes over morning watch aboard the Silver Kestrel, the finest airship aloft, to find a first-class passenger stabbed to death in his own stateroom.

Now she must investigate – tactfully, whatever that means – a burgeoning diplomatic incident, navigating the towering egos of influential passengers who each have something to hide.

Because if she doesn’t find her quarry within the day, this will be the Kestrel’s final flight.

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What would you get if Terry Pratchett's Discworld visited Agatha Christie's Murder on the Nile? Probably something along the lines of Victoria Bergman's Murder on the Airship. 

When guard Thyria finds one of the annoying first-class passengers stabbed to death on the airship Silver Kestrel, it isn't a great start to her day. The good news is that there are a limited number of suspects, since most of the passengers were in town partying for the solstice. The rest of the news is all bad. All the guests have reasons to want him dead; the airship has been sabotaged; the elves and naga are about five minutes from war and everyone is taking sides on the ship; there's at least two assassination attempts on top of the murder; a smuggled dragon; and let's not even mention the pixies. The guard who should be in charge is in sickbay with a bad case of being poisoned and it's up to Thyria to figure out what happened—preferably before the local dwarves get involved. But when everyone has a reason to want soomeone dead, how do you find the actual killer?

Thyria is a fun character. She's not a detective. She's the guard who gets to threaten smugglers and toss drunks off her ship while her boss handles things like "diplomacy" and "politeness". So she's completely out of her element being asked to deal with important ambasadors and first-class passengers. Give her a good bar fight any day! She's quite sure at first she can't handle the assignment. But the captain is busy and she's the only one left to handle it, so she has to grit her teeth and figure it out.

There's a delightful sense of humor to  Bergman's writing. Thyria approaches the murder (and the world) with a no-nonsense, we're-all-in-this-together-so-why-waste-my-time feeling. The various high-handed sensibilities of the senators, ambasadors, and self-described important people she has to deal with don't get anywhere with her. But they try. While she may not be able to threaten them the way she can incompentent mercenaries and moronic magic students, she learns the power of a fake smile and a little blackmail.

While things got a little overly complicated in ways they might not have needed to, and tangled with a few extra subplots, Murder on the Airship was a delightful cozy fantasy mystery that should make readers of both genres happy and looking for more by Victoria Bergman. I will certainly be hoping for more flights by the Silver Kestrel.

I received this ARC from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review