Murder and Malice by Hugh Greene - REVIEW
In Murder and Malice, Hugh Greene invites readers into a world where intellect, power and morality intersect — and quietly implode. It’s a sophisticated psychological thriller that unravels in a world of universities, research funding, and the uneasy marriage between knowledge and corruption. The tone is deliberate and elegant; the violence is intellectual as much as physical. Greene writes as if he’s dissecting the soul of modern ambition with the precision of a pathologist.
The novel opens not in a study or a boardroom, but under a foreign sky. A woman named Savina Daidalos wakes among crushed grass and Maltese dust, unsure how she got there, her mind fractured between memory and dread. In this haunting prologue, Greene displays the restraint and control that define his storytelling. Every sensory detail — the scent of earth, the brightness of the stars, the metallic taste of fear — pulls the reader into a living nightmare. When Savina approaches a research station and encounters the enigmatic figure she knows only as “The Banker,” the scene shifts from curiosity to horror. What follows is one of the most unsettling and cinematic sequences in recent crime fiction: an experiment in sound, a weapon that attacks the brain itself, and a woman who vanishes into the cliffs.
From there, Greene changes tempo completely. We meet Dr Carl Power, a psychiatrist recently appointed professor at a northern English university. He is drawn into academic politics with a Vice Chancellor who behaves like a medieval prince — charming, gluttonous, and dangerously ambitious. Armitage wants a new medical school; Power wants it built on ethics and intellect. What neither anticipates is how easily noble ambitions can be manipulated once money begins to whisper.
This tension between moral purpose and institutional decay is the real heartbeat of Murder and Malice. While the novel features murder, deceit, and international intrigue, its most enduring question is how corruption hides in plain sight — inside bureaucracy, friendship, and good intentions.
Greene’s prose is beautifully balanced. He writes with a clinician’s clarity, yet with the rhythm and atmosphere of classic English mystery. A single paragraph can move from the scent of coffee to the shape of a conscience. His eye for setting is precise: oak-panelled offices, shadowed corridors, and the salty glare of Malta’s limestone coast. These environments are never mere decoration — they echo the novel’s themes of containment and exposure.
Dr Power himself is an absorbing character, caught between reason and intuition. He listens, he observes, and he suffers from the professional curse of seeing too much. There’s a quiet sadness to him — a man of empathy surrounded by people who weaponise intelligence. His conversations with the Vice Chancellor are masterclasses in subtext: two men playing chess while pretending to be allies.
One of Greene’s most notable achievements is his dialogue. It has the natural rhythm of real conversation, yet each line feels charged with implication. Few crime writers manage to make their characters sound intelligent without slipping into exposition; Greene does it effortlessly. There’s wit here, but it’s dry and organic — never theatrical.
As the narrative unfolds, we glimpse Power’s collaboration with former detective Andrew Lynch, head of a foundation devoted to revisiting unsolved crimes. Their bond brings warmth to the otherwise cold intellectual landscape. Their friendship, based on mutual respect and unspoken burdens, gives the story its emotional anchor. Through their discussions, Greene explores themes of justice, truth, and the limits of institutional integrity.
Behind the scenes, an invisible network connects Power’s academic world to Savina’s tragedy in Malta — a research project funded by shadowy investors, the development of a “saser” (a weapon using focused sound), and a trail of deceit that winds through university corridors as surely as it does through the corridors of power. Greene handles these shifts with assurance. The story moves seamlessly between the psychological and the procedural, between the thrill of discovery and the dread of knowing too much.
There are moments of gothic unease, too — a recurring motif of sound and silence, echo and listening. It’s fitting, since Power is both psychiatrist and listener, a man who lives by deciphering the unsaid. The book’s epigraph — “Don’t look for the meanings in the words. Listen to the silences” — could describe Greene’s entire method. Every omission, every polite phrase in a faculty meeting, carries the weight of concealed motive.
Greene’s experience and research show through in every page. His knowledge of psychiatry, forensics, and academia is woven in without pretence. Readers familiar with the politics of universities will find his depiction of committee manoeuvres and career rivalries almost painfully accurate. Yet the story never drowns in detail; it stays taut, propelled by a quiet but constant unease.
What distinguishes Murder and Malice from the average crime novel is its moral intelligence. The violence here is often intellectual — a subtle degradation of values, a deal made too easily, a silence kept for too long. When physical danger comes, it feels earned, grounded in the characters’ moral compromises. Greene seems to suggest that evil rarely bursts into life; it accrues slowly, like damp behind the wallpaper.
The supporting cast is equally vivid: Armitage, the corpulent Vice Chancellor with a taste for pastries and power; Professor Shacklin, a sycophant in an expensive ring; and the elusive Banker, whose presence haunts the novel like a ghost. Each character represents a facet of moral blindness — greed, vanity, obedience — and Greene renders them with chilling plausibility.
Though it begins as a crime mystery, Murder and Malice evolves into something richer: an inquiry into conscience, ambition, and the price of silence. Readers expecting relentless action will find instead a story that simmers, a web of tension built through intellect rather than bloodshed. The result is more satisfying than any quick-fire thriller because it lingers — the kind of book that continues to play in your thoughts like an unresolved chord.
There are echoes here of Graham Greene (appropriately), of P. D. James’s moral gravity, and of John le Carré’s fascination with institutions and betrayal. Yet Hugh Greene’s voice is distinct — calm, precise, and quietly merciless. He writes about how people justify themselves, and how even the most rational minds can be seduced by money, love, or the illusion of progress.
By the time the novel’s threads begin to converge — the Maltese cliffs, the missing money, the academic power struggles — the reader realises that Greene isn’t writing merely about crime but about complicity. Murder and Malice exposes the fine line between curiosity and corruption, between the healer and the experimenter, between knowledge and moral blindness.
It’s a thriller for readers who like their crimes cerebral, their villains plausible, and their heroes imperfect. The suspense is measured in heartbeats rather than gunshots, and the horror lies in how recognisable it all feels.
Verdict: Murder and Malice is intelligent, layered, and deeply unsettling — a psychological and moral mystery that rewards patience and reflection. Hugh Greene writes with the assurance of a craftsman and the conscience of a philosopher. Beneath the elegant prose lies a warning: when intellect loses empathy, even the most civilised institutions can turn predatory.
