Death on the Caldera by Emily Paxman

Promoted as “It’s Murder on the Orient Express—with witches!” Death on the Caldera, Victoria author Emily Paxman’s debut novel, initially grabbed my (occasionally churlish) attention for what I assumed to be intrinsic, albeit comical, daft silliness—like Sex and the City, only with werewolves. Or King Lear where the cast is made up of literal robots.

Then I thought of earlier mash-ups—Michael Thomas Ford’s Jane Austen Vampire Trilogy, Seth Grahame-Smith’s Pride and Prejudice and Zombies—whose grisly inventiveness and sly humour attracted fans far and wide and sold in the millions.

Snake on a Plane, witches on a train—why not?

The wonder of fiction is that it can be virtually anything.

In contrast to the economical size (256 pages) of Agatha Christie’s Orient Express, Caldera adds another 200 pages. And for a good reason.

While Paxman’s scenery might have a passing resemblance to Europe roughly between 1890 and 1930, the novel’s first clue that it does not in fact take place there comes with that unusual word in the title. The Caldera is not a ship, nor a train or zeppelin. It’s an actual volcanic caldera, formed when an active volcano collapses and reforms as a cauldron-like bowl.

In Paxman’s alternative-universe timeline, a super-volcano erupted about three centuries earlier. It destroyed the immediate areas, scattered the survivors, and, in a matter of minutes, both radically reorganized the geo-political map (empires fell, factions emerged, religious beliefs diversified) and introduced super-charged minerals whose users—called volchemists—harness and apply the magical powers of these volcanic remnants.

Depending on the nation, the spells and enchantments and potions of volchemistry are prohibited and outlawed or else strictly controlled. Naturally, as regulated yet powerful substances, volchems are sought after; and alongside a brisk business in nation-to-nation smuggling, a black market has developed, especially because some of the minerals’ properties lead to “mists” that produce forgetfulness, muddled thinking, or truth-telling—all of which are handy for diplomacy, business deals, and exerting political influence. These chemicals play pivotal roles in the novel.

On top of all this history, there are witches, independent operators who operate with their own set of rules. In the novel they seem akin to Roma—dispossessed and itinerant, operating by unknown principles and loyalties (though with unknown but possibly hostile intentions). They’re exclusively female, furthermore, and in Paxman’s appealing feat of world-building, a witch exists within an ordinary woman in a Jekyll/Hyde kind of way. She can emerge when the woman is in danger, for instance, and when she does so it’s with fearsome force. Plus, other witches can summon an inactive witch when they learn the woman’s witch name. Regardless of origin, the witch is an angry and powerful figure—and much more inclined to turn an enemy into a pile of cinders than to trade diplomatic words over a cup of Earl Grey.

Paxman is a whiz at threading this complex and evolving history into a recognizably Christie-esque formula, whether it’s Death on the Nile or A Haunting in Venice.

In Caldera, a group of apparent strangers board a locomotive that’s set to travel from one nation to another. Practically everyone—a trio of siblings who are also royals, a novice at a religious order, various gentlemen, a novelist, and an acrobat, to list just a handful—has a secret, a pseudonym, an ulterior motive, and a peculiar set of skills. Before you can say “Miss Marple,” an explosion on board maroons the survivors in the middle of nowhere on the caldera. Worse, there’s a violent murder (the first of several). Worse still, the explosion, which turns part of the train into stone, was probably caused by witchcraft. Witch (or witches?) on the train, murders on a train, oh my!

With Paxman’s squabbling homespun detectives (which reads more Scooby-Doo than Agatha Christie) investigating, this whale of a tale barrels along—fun, intriguing, deeply weird, and told with aplomb.

Emily Paxman is an author and artist from Vancouver Island in beautiful British Columbia, Canada. She’s a huge fan of gardening, cats, watercolour painting, and several other hobbies that befit an octogenarian. She has her Master’s of Fine Arts in Creative Writing from Chatham University, has written for indie video game company Wizard Games, and splits her time (unevenly) between creating comics and writing novels. You can read her webcomic, Neptune Bay, on Webtoon. Death on the Caldera is her debut novel.

Publisher: Titan (June 17, 2025)
Paperback 8″ x 5″ | 448 pages
ISBN: 9781835411582

Brett Josef Grubisic

Brett Josef Grubisic resides on Salt Spring Island, BC, where he's currently at war with his sixth novel. Previous novels include The Age of Cities and My Two-Faced Luck.