nocto

The second volume in the Roth trilogy really needs to be read as the second volume; although I haven't read the third yet I'll issue a warning to all to read these books in order. Without the first volume to lay clues for this book I don't think it would be nearly as potent at being a thriller. Knowing where the characters end up about a quarter of a century later really adds the edge to this book. As a standalone it wouldn't be nearly as powerful.

This book takes place in Roth, once a picturesque village and now a suburb of London, in 1970 and is narrated by the vicar of Roth, David Byfield, who appears as a minor character in The Four Last Things. One of the major characters in the first book is Michael Appleyard who appears here as an eleven year old.

This time, although I am wondering what happens in the third part of the trilogy (which goes backwards in time again and Taylor has again left pointers to the kind of thing that will happen in that book and has already happened to the characters), I'm mainly finding myself wanting to go back to the first book and piece together the parts that I didn't know enough to understand at the time. Having read these books from the library means I'm going to have to go and hunt it out before I can stop thinking about it.

Unless the third volume of the trilogy lets me down, and I can't see it doing so as it won the CWA's Ellis Peters Historical Dagger a couple of years back, this is definitely a classic and classy work.

Borrowed.

Take the good bits of a sweeping family saga type book and a writer who mostly writes mysteries but isn't really writing a hard core mystery here, place them down in the bit of time that stretches before and after the "great war" with some things coming all the way down to the present day and you have a really good read.

If forced to decide I'd probably say I prefer Linscott's Nell Bray series books which are set in more or less the same period of time but I did very much enjoy this and it confirms that Linscott knows her historical stuff very well and is an expert at weaving it into the plot without lecturing you.

Borrowed.

Hmmmm, hard to know how to put into words how I feel about this book. I keep hearing from a number of different sources about how this series is rapidly freewheeling into decline and so I was expecting to be disappointed by it. In the light of going into the book thinking like that I was fairly pleased by the story. But I think everyone else probably has a point and the series isn't half as good as it once was.

One thing that isn't working for me is Anna's new relationship with the sherriff and priest. The series needs a relationship that adds something to the stories and takes Anna to new places. And this relationship is underdeveloped, under utilised and just feels generally tacked on rather than part of Anna's life. To be fair Anna's previous boyfriends in the series haven't been great parts of the story, even Fred the Fed who stuck around for the longest time and had a role in the mysteries as well as in the love life didn't work very well. So the sheriff part of her new man seems destined to not fit in very well on the law enforcement side, and the priest bit will give atheist Anna ethics to muddle with but won't serve that purpose as well as alcohol did. I hope Barr is just setting the boyfriend up to be a baddie in a future book.

The mystery here is better than I'd expected but not a patch on earlier episodes. Some things seemed blatantly silly. Anna blunders recklessly into trouble too many times and I can almost let her get away with this as she is a member of an understaffed policing team and it's more or less her job to blunder into trouble like this, but it is getting tired now.

And last, but not least, I'm fed up with Anna staying in one National Park. I miss the wide and varied landscapes of the places that the earlier books were set. Adventures on the Natchez Trace Parkway in Mississippi seem to consist mainly of driving up and down the road and Barr remarks herself numerous times how repetitive the scenery is. The boyfriend situation doesn't look good for moving Anna someplace more interesting though.

In summary, not as bad as I'd feared, not as good as I'd hoped, and not many signs that the series will rebound either.

Purchased on 13th February 2003.

[read for a mailing list discussion; comments will appear when the discussion gets underway and will contain spoilers.]

Borrowed.

I'm definitely running out of things to say about Reginald Hill because it seems I am destined to be never disappointed by his books. This is a very good thing and I'm not complaining. It's taken me several months to get hold of this book as it seemed to be in the middle of a reprint when I finished the previous book. It's also an episode of the series that I've only heard exceedingly good things about and so I was really looking forwrad to it.

It hasn't turned out to be my favourite read of the series though. I thought it went a bit too far into coincidences and unlikelihoods. A writer this good can get away with spinning a tale that eats its own tail like this but I definitely prefer some of the other, less lauded, stories.

In this story Chief Inspector Peter Pascoe discovers that his great grandfather who was killed in the first world war at Passchendaele wasn't killed in battle at all but executed by his countrymen. It makes for a great background and it is very interesting but the way Pascoe's historical investigations marry with the present day story has echoes of the kind of thing I have to ignore in Kate Ellis's books in order to enjoy them. Also having done quite a bit of genealogical research of my own lately the way that Pascoe finds out about his family history had me laughing my socks off (walks into local church, vicar happily skims through parish registers and gives him a potted version and sends him on to a distant aunt who tells all, yeah right, that's great detective work).

It's a good read all the same, but it's a long way from being my favourite of this series and I didn't find it the most well crafted story in the series either.

Borrowed.