nocto

I read The Normal Man years ago and enjoyed it enough to remember the author's name (that's less of an insult than it sounds really!) but it's taken until now for me to turn up another book by Boyt. It turns out this is actually her first book, I don't know if she ever published a third one.

This is the story of Nell, who grows up mostly without a father in London and goes on to fall in love with her poet tutor at Oxford. What's great about it is how well the characters are drawn and how deeply embarrassed I was about Nell's crush while I was reading it. It brought back memories of things that I'd rather have forgotten but it was all the better a book for having that effect on me.

Purchased on 11th October 2003.

Taylor's definitely moving up and up my list of favourite authors. Every book in the series adds to and enlarges on the ones that came before it. The attraction between the two main investigators in this series originally felt like something that might get a bit cheesey or even boring after a book or three, but after four it's still got plenty of life left in it as hurdles that were set up in earlier books come to light.

Oh yeah, there's a good mystery with a great twist in it's tail here too. I think we're taking the solidity of Taylor's plots for granted from now on.

Purchased on 12th October 2003.

I really enjoyed this and thought it was much better crafted than the first in the series but I think the author wrote several other books in between. There's a very short list of suspects for the murder but the misdirection is very cleverly done and I didn't feel at all cheated by the resolution, really very clever. It's a very old fashioned kind of setup: a small village that's practically snowbound at Christmas and the body turns up at the vicarage. But it's definitely a modern non-cosy mystery, it just plays with the golden age kind of setting whilst having many elements that are up to date.

It's looking good for a series with the main police protagonists getting their private lives all in a mess too, complicated situations making for much better ongoing stories than simple ones as horrid as it sounds to say it!

Purchased on 27th May 2003.

I needed something fast and easy to dive into and this was just the thing. I enjoyed it better than Chocolat though it was good to come across some of the same characters again. I knew these books were a kind of trilogy but i didn't realise I'd end up back in the same village with some of the same characters. This is a device I really quite like in books, starting off with something completely different from earlier books but having the universes join up on you in the middle. Great fun.

I had a look around Joanne Harris's website and apparently the third book gets darker so I'm really looking forward to that. I liked the way this one was half set in Yorkshire too, I could just imagine Pog Hill Lane somewhere around here.

Purchased on 29th July 2003.

The opinions I've come across on this book are divided pretty evenly between 'couldn't read it' and 'absolutely loved it' - no one seems to end up on the middle ground. I thought the lack of averageness was as good a reason to read it as any, and besides, it sounded fascinatingly different from the mysteries I generally devour.

The story is divided into four separate narratives; each detailing some of the same events from another point of view, each adding to and changing the reader's idea of what has happened. The scene is mostly Oxford in 1663, after the English Civil War and before the Bubonic Plague and the Great Fire of London enter the history books. Many of the characters are real people, some of them I recognised, many of them I didn't know, there's a note at the end that points out the real from the fictional.

I wasn't totally compelled by the book, there were certainly parts of the second and third stories where I could have left the book for a while, but I couldn't put it down for too long. Darren assured me that Pears knew how to end a book and this added to my feeling that this was a book worth the effort of reading. At close on seven hundred pages, all written somewhat in seventeenth century style, it's quite a weighty read. The narratives that begin and end the story are easier reads than the two in between though and towards the end when all the pieces of the puzzle begin to fall into their places it's quite magical.

So I'm definitely camped out with the people who think this is an excellent book. One of the things that worried me when I was reading was that some of the small details would turn out to be essential to the plot and that my enjoyment would be marred by forgetting something that seemed minor, that while the four narratives built on top of each other I'd miss a difference between them that would ruin the book for me in the end. To future readers I'd just like to say that that won't be the case. Like any whodunnit the clues are clear enough when the author wants to make them seen, sit back and enjoy the story and let the author do his work.

Borrowed.

A copy of this book is available on BookMooch.